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Despite the criminal nature of intimate partner violence, scholars infrequently apply general theories of crime to understanding its causes (Dixon, Archer, & Graham-Kevan, 2012). Indeed, some scholars reject the notion that the causes of intimate partner violence align with the causes of general crime and violence (Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, & Daly, 1992). A second area of contention is whether male and female violence can be explained within the same theoretical framework (Dutton & Nicholls, 2005). In this thesis I argue that as a type of criminal behaviour, understanding the causes of intimate partner violence from a criminological perspective is a valid and necessary research endeavour. Further, guided by the principles of the theoretical framework of this thesis, I submit that both male and female intimate partner violence can be explained within the same general theory of crime. This thesis applies situational action theory, a general theory of crime that places morality at the centre of its explanatory framework, to the understanding and explanation of intimate partner violence. This thesis concentrates on the roles of personal morality and provocation in intimate partner violence perpetration. Partner conflict is defined as the experience of provocation, while friction sensitivity and low partner cohesion are included as key factors leading to partner conflict. Specifically, this thesis examines whether the strength of personal morality influences whether individuals respond to provocation with violence against a partner. To address the aims of the research, this thesis uses data from the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study, a study designed to test situational action theory. Participants are a representative sample of males and females between 24 and 25 years of age. Path analyses using a multiple-group method revealed that high friction sensitivity and low partner cohesion contributed to increased partner violence perpetration by influencing the level of partner conflict. Morality had a significant moderating effect on the path between partner conflict and partner violence perpetration. Namely, individuals with weak morality, and who frequently engaged in partner conflict, were significantly more likely to perpetrate acts of partner violence than individuals with strong morality who engaged in frequent conflict with a partner. These findings were replicated across males and females. The findings of this research illustrate the importance of morality in the explanation of partner violence, and provide evidence that both male and female partner violence can be explained within the framework of situational action theory.

Cette thèse se propose de comprendre la formation et le rôle du concept de causalité dans la philosophie d'Henri Bergson (1859-1941 ), notamment au cours de la période allant de 1889 à 1907. La première partie de ce travail porte sur la redéfinition du concept de causalité dans l'Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience ( 1889). Dans cet ouvrage, pour que la causalité en général devienne une "causalité psychologique", Bergson interroge l'importance du concept de causalité dans la détermination de l'expérience interne du temps. Il s'agit pour nous de mettre au jour la manière dont ce changement s'opère sur des bases philosophiques fermes. Dans la deuxième partie, nous examinons comment Bergson, quittant la voie de la théorie de la connaissance, s'oriente vers une ontologie de la mémoire fondée sur des bases physiologiques hésitantes, où l'idée du corps occupe une place particulière. Nous nous pencherons dans cette partie sur les détails de cette causalité conçue comme un "sentiment de l'effort''. La troisième et dernière partie de cette thèse présente une réflexion d'ensemble sur les points de vue susmentionnés. On y met en relief l'importance des deux causalités bergsoniennes à travers l'analyse d'un cours inédit de Georges Canguilhem. La manière dont ce dernier valorise la problématique de la causalité dans la philosophie de Bergson est précisément celle que nous adoptons pour tenter de saisir une telle question. Ainsi, la discussion autour des difficultés de l'action matérielle servira de base pour comprendre la spécificité du problème de l'invention technique. / This thesis aims to understand the formation and the role of the causality concept in the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941 ), notably in the period from 1889 to 1907. Its first part is devoted to exposing the redefinition of causality concept within Time and Consciousness (1889). In this book, a set of statements were assumed by the philosopher so that causality in general becomes a sort of "psychological causality", particularly in order to question the importance of the concept of causality itself in determining the inner experience of time. It is our intent to underscore how this change is operated on a cautious philosophical basis. In the second part of this work, we try to disclose how Bergson abandons the path of the theory of knowledge on behalf of an ontology based on controversial physiological bases, notably regarding the idea of body, which the author presents in Matter and memory (1896). It is from the conceptual unfolding of a causality conceived as the "feeling of effort'' that we are concerned here. Finally, the third part of the thesis presents an overall reflection on the points of view mentioned above. In it, the relevance of the two causalities is highlighted by the analysis of an unpublished course by Georges Canguilhem, in which the problem of causality in Bergson's philosophy is valued according to the way in which we Il)' to understand and reveal it here. Thus, the discussion on the difficulties of material action may represent a prelude to the comprehension of the specificity of the problem of technical invention. / Esta tese tem por objetivo compreender a formação e o papel do conceito de causalidade na filosofia de Henri Bergson (1859-1941), notadamente no período de 1889 a 1907. Sua primeira parte é dedicada à exposição da redefinição do conceito de causalidade dentro do Ensaio sobre os dados imediatos da consciência (1889). Neste livro, para que a causalidade em geral torne-se certa “causalidade psicológica”, uma série de posicionamentos teve de ser tomada pelo filósofo no intuito de questionar a importância de tal conceito na determinação da experiência interna do tempo. É nosso propósito pôr em evidência como essa mudança é operada sobre bases filosóficas seguras. Na segunda parte deste trabalho, procuramos expor como Bergson abandona a via da teoria do conhecimento em prol de uma ontologia fundamentada em bases fisiológicas inseguras, notadamente no que concerne à ideia de corpo que o autor apresenta em Matéria e memória (1896). Do ponto de vista filosófico, sua concepção de subjetividade, definida a partir de um campo de possibilidades, deixa em aberto modo como esse campo transforma-se, em retorno, da possibilidade à realidade. Dito de outro modo, o filósofo garante a especificidade da ação metafísica com precisão filosófica, mas não avança sobre o problema da realização com grau de precisão comparável. Com efeito, em algumas circunstâncias no ínterim de Matéria e memória (1896) e A evolução criadora (1907), Bergson ocupa-se do problema da realização em referência explícita ao próprio problema da causalidade. É dos desdobramentos conceituais desta causalidade concebida como “sentimento do esforço” que nos ocupamos aqui. Por fim, a terceira parte deste trabalho apresenta uma reflexão de conjunto sobre os pontos de vista acima mencionados. Nela, a relevância das duas causalidades é posta em destaque através da análise de um curso inédito de Georges Canguilhem, em que a problemática da causalidade na filosofia de Bergson é valorizada segundo o modo como procuramos entendê-la e expô-la nesta tese. Assim, a discussão das dificuldades da ação material poderá representar um prelúdio à compreensão da especificidade do problema da invenção técnica.

L’accélération du rythme des innovations technologiques et les pressions exercées par la société civile constituent deux défis majeurs pour le droit de la responsabilité civile. Cette thèse étudie les effets incitatifs de la responsabilité civile sur le comportement de prévention des entreprises dans ce contexte. Notre contribution vise, en particulier, à approfondir l’analyse traditionnelle de la responsabilité civile des entreprises d’une part, et d’autre part à évaluer dans quelle mesure les sanctions non légales jouent un rôle au côté de ce cadre juridique. D’abord, nous mettons en évidence l’évolution de l’analyse économique de la responsabilité. Puis nous étudions la responsabilité civile dans un modèle théorique, avec pour contribution d’évaluer les effets incitatifs du concept juridique de causalité. Ensuite, nous examinons comment les difficultés de prévision des risques d’accident affectent les incitations fournies par la responsabilité civile,par un modèle théorique d’une part, et par une expérimentation en laboratoire d’autre part. Nous développons dans un modèle théorique une analyse du rôle des sanctions non légales, émanant de la société civile,aux côtés de la responsabilité délictuelle. Nous montrons que les incitations fournies par le boycott des consommateurs sur le comportement de prévention des entreprises sont limitées. Enfin, nous complétons ce modèle par une étude empirique, et nous étudions l’ampleur et les déterminants du phénomène de boycott des consommateurs en Europe. / The accelerating pace of technological innovations and pressures from civil society provide tort law with new challenges. This thesis studies the incentive effects of tort law on corporate investment in prevention in this context. Particularly, this study deepens the traditional economic analysis of corporate civil liability and assess the effects of the combination of non legal sanctions and the legal framework. First, we highlight the evolution of the economic analysis of liability and responsibility. Then, we study the incentive effects ofcivil liability in a theoretical model, with a particular emphasis on the role of the legal notion of causality. Next, we examine to what extent the difficulties of predicting accident risks affect incentives provided by liability with both a theoretical model and with a lab experiment. In a theoretical model, we develop ananalysis of the role of non-legal sanctions, from civil society, along side the tort law. We show that the incentive effects of consumer boycott on corporate investment in prevention are limited. Finally, through an empirical study, we complete this analysis by studying the magnitude and determinants of consumer boycott in Europe.

The cost of creating new property and casualty insurance accounts is much greater than the costs associated with sustaining current accounts. Property and casualty insurance agency managers lack strategies to retain customers, the retention of whom has been found to improve revenue. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore strategies for insurance agency managers to retain customers and improve revenue. The population used for the study was 4 insurance agency managers in the Northeastern United States. The conceptual framework was customer relationship management, which is a technological and organizational mechanism for buffering market instability by understanding customer concerns. Three data collection methods were used: semistructured interviews, documentation review, and review of physical artifacts. The approach to data analysis was general inductive to allow codes to emerge from the raw data, one with qualitative software used to condense raw data into key themes. Five themes emerged in the study: customer relationship management, employee communication, customer satisfaction, influence of strategic planning, and competition. The study may contribute to social change by offering guidance to property and casualty insurance agency managers on business sustainability, which may result in improvements to the local economy through the provision of sustainable jobs to community members, increases in employee retention, and the offering of reliable services to customers.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis presents results on optimal coding and decoding of discrete-time stochastic signals, in the sense of minimizing a distortion metric subject to a constraint on the bit-rate and on the signal transfer function from source to reconstruction. The first (preliminary) contribution of this thesis is the introduction of new distortion metric that extends the mean squared error (MSE) criterion. We give this extension the name Weighted-Correlation MSE (WCMSE), and use it as the distortion metric throughout the thesis. The WCMSE is a weighted sum of two components of the MSE: the variance of the error component uncorrelated to the source, on the one hand, and the remainder of the MSE, on the other. The WCMSE can take account of signal transfer function constraints by assigning a larger weight to deviations from a target signal transfer function than to source-uncorrelated distortion. Within this framework, the second contribution is the solution of a family of feedback quantizer design problems for wide sense stationary sources using an additive noise model for quantization errors. These associated problems consist of finding the frequency response of the filters deployed around a scalar quantizer that minimize the WCMSE for a fixed quantizer signal-to-(granular)-noise ratio (SNR). This general structure, which incorporates pre-, post-, and feedback filters, includes as special cases well known source coding schemes such as pulse coded modulation (PCM), Differential Pulse-Coded Modulation (DPCM), Sigma Delta converters, and noise-shaping coders. The optimal frequency response of each of the filters in this architecture is found for each possible subset of the remaining filters being given and fixed. These results are then applied to oversampled feedback quantization. In particular, it is shown that, within the linear model used, and for a fixed quantizer SNR, the MSE decays exponentially with oversampling ratio, provided optimal filters are used at each oversampling ratio. If a subtractively dithered quantizer is utilized, then the noise model is exact, and the SNR constraint can be directly related to the bit-rate if entropy coding is used, regardless of the number of quantization levels. On the other hand, in the case of fixed-rate quantization, the SNR is related to the number of quantization levels, and hence to the bit-rate, when overload errors are negligible. It is shown that, for sources with unbounded support, the latter condition is violated for sufficiently large oversampling ratios. By deriving an upper bound on the contribution of overload errors to the total WCMSE, a lower bound for the decay rate of the WCMSE as a function of the oversampling ratio is found for fixed-rate quantization of sources with finite or infinite support. The third main contribution of the thesis is the introduction of the rate-distortion function (RDF) when WCMSE is the distortion metric, denoted by WCMSE-RDF. We provide a complete characterization for Gaussian sources. The resulting WCMSE-RDF yields, as special cases, Shannon's RDF, as well as the recently introduced RDF for source-uncorrelated distortions (RDF-SUD). For cases where only source-uncorrelated distortion is allowed, the RDF-SUD is extended to include the possibility of linear-time invariant feedback between reconstructed signal and coder input. It is also shown that feedback quantization schemes can achieve a bit-rate only 0.254 bits/sample above this RDF by using the same filters that minimize the reconstruction MSE for a quantizer-SNR constraint. The fourth main contribution of this thesis is to provide a set of conditions under which knowledge of a realization of the RDF can be used directly to solve encoder-decoder design optimization problems. This result has direct implications in the design of subband coders with feedback, as well as in the design of encoder-decoder pairs for applications such as networked control. As the fifth main contribution of this thesis, the RDF-SUD is utilized to show that, for Gaussian sta-tionary sources with memory and MSE distortion criterion, an upper bound on the information-theoretic causal RDF can be obtained by means of an iterative numerical procedure, at all rates. This bound is tighter than 0:5 bits/sample. Moreover, if there exists a realization of the causal RDF in which the re-construction error is jointly stationary with the source, then the bound obtained coincides with the causal RDF. The iterative procedure proposed here to obtain Ritc(D) also yields a characterization of the filters in a scalar feedback quantizer having an operational rate that exceeds the bound by less than 0:254 bits/sample. This constitutes an upper bound on the optimal performance theoretically attainable by any causal source coder for stationary Gaussian sources under the MSE distortion criterion.

<p>During the last decade, Activity-Based Costing (ABC) has been recognized as a means to obtain more accurate and relevant information of product cost. Consultants have tried using the ABC concept as leverage for new projects, representatives from companies have attended seminars, and articles have been written on the theoretical foundations, the empirical justification, and on the implementation process. However, little progress seems to have been made despite of these activities. The question, whether ABC is the solution to the “Relevance Lost” or not, still remains to be answered. The research is based on a case study of an Ericsson company that has introduced Activity-Based Costing model for product costing. The purpose is to provide a critical evaluation and analysis of the existing model and to discuss how to “regain the relevance” of product costing through ABC. The study is conducted by interviewing relevant persons who are responsible for costing model and production process at Ericsson Mobile Communications AB in Linköping (ECS). Relevant documents during the implementation of ABC model have also been examined. Despite of a logical ABC model within ECS, the accuracy of cost information has not been improved. Many factors have been forgotten. Keeping costing model update, relating managers’ responsibility to activities performed and taking the cost of unused capacity into account are several examples. The study shows that ABCis not and will not be, however, the solution to the aging traditional product costing unless one uses it properly.</p>

During the last decade, Activity-Based Costing (ABC) has been recognized as a means to obtain more accurate and relevant information of product cost. Consultants have tried using the ABC concept as leverage for new projects, representatives from companies have attended seminars, and articles have been written on the theoretical foundations, the empirical justification, and on the implementation process. However, little progress seems to have been made despite of these activities. The question, whether ABC is the solution to the “Relevance Lost” or not, still remains to be answered. The research is based on a case study of an Ericsson company that has introduced Activity-Based Costing model for product costing. The purpose is to provide a critical evaluation and analysis of the existing model and to discuss how to “regain the relevance” of product costing through ABC. The study is conducted by interviewing relevant persons who are responsible for costing model and production process at Ericsson Mobile Communications AB in Linköping (ECS). Relevant documents during the implementation of ABC model have also been examined. Despite of a logical ABC model within ECS, the accuracy of cost information has not been improved. Many factors have been forgotten. Keeping costing model update, relating managers’ responsibility to activities performed and taking the cost of unused capacity into account are several examples. The study shows that ABCis not and will not be, however, the solution to the aging traditional product costing unless one uses it properly.

This thesis has studied short and long-term dependence structures between European stock markets. Johansen's test for cointegration and Granger's test for non-causality have been applied in order to measure the degree of financial integration in Europe. The cointegration analysis has employed a comparative perspective in which different countries with different institutional adaptation to the economic cooperation within Europe have been considered. The study finds strong support for the existence of cointegration between the Belgian, Norwegian, Swiss and British stock markets in the period after the launch of the euro. This result indicates that financial integration has increased in Europe since no cointegration was identified prior to the introduction of the euro. However, it is more difficult to determine to what extent the European financial cooperation has affected the degree of integration because of the difficulties with isolating formal treaties contribution to the stationary equilibrium. Both the EU and the euro's importance may have affected the integration process, but this thesis finds that this is not the only explanation. Thus, it is more likely that the liberalization of financial markets and the overall integration process best explain the increase in financial integration. The most significant finding is that the cointegrated stock markets in the long-term can be regarded as a regional financial market characterized by similar systematic risk factors. This has implications for both policy-makers who adjust existing policies in Europe and investors looking to allocate portfolios in an efficient manner.

國內有許多以不同資料、次市場劃分以及控制品質的方法編製房地產相關價格指數，提供不同的價格資訊，然而編製的過程可能產生偏誤，影響價格指數之準確性，導致房價指數變動與市場訊息不符，因此各種相關房價指數之市場代表性仍有待釐清。 本文首先觀察目前市場較常使用之信義房價指數(中古屋)及國泰房地產指數(預售屋及新成屋)，發現近年來信義房價指數無法適當反應房地產市場景氣繁榮的情形。此二房價指數領先落後的關係亦不符合相關理論及過去實證，因此認為此二房價指數長期趨勢受到編製資料及估計方法上的偏誤所影響。接著利用政府(房地產交易價格簡訊)及業者(台灣不動產成交行情公報)資料以特徵價格法重新建立台北市及台北縣中古屋房價指數，並與信義房價指數作比較，結果顯示本文建立之中古屋房價指數相對於信義房價指數較符合市場變動與相關訊息。最後，為求未來房地產資訊之應用，將過去相關房價指數研究成果與本文建立之房價指數整合，並驗證台北市國泰房地產指數領先整合中古屋房價指數一季，台北縣國泰房地產指數領先整合中古屋房價指數二季，顯示此台北都會區的中古屋及預售屋房價指數相互間的關係符合相關理論推導與過去實證結果。 / There are many real-estate related price indices established in various formation of datum, submarkets and modeling, providing different kinds of price information. But the process itself may be a victim of error, hence affecting the precision of price indices and cause discrepancy between price indices’ variation and correlative market information, therefore the representativeness of real-estate related price indices must be clarified. In this study, we observe the commonly used Sinyi Housing Price Index (existing housing) and Cathay Real-Estate Price Index(pre-sales and new housing), and discovered that Sinyi Housing Price Index is incapable of reflecting the recent boom in the real-estate market. The Granger Causality test result of these two housing price indices(HPI) is inconsequent to relevant theory and empirical studies, therefore attribute this to the error within the establishment of HPI. Then, we reestablish existing housing HPI of Taipei city and Taipei county by using government and enterprise organized data. In comparison to Sinyi Housing Price Index, our newly established HPI cohere with correlative market information. And last, for future application of real-estate market information, we integrate empirical studies in the past with ours and examine its lead-lag relation with Cathay Real-Estate Price Index. The Granger Causality test result corresponds to relevant theory and empirical studies, furthermore, we found that the time-gap between Cathay Real-Estate Price Index and the Integrated existing housing HPI in Taipei city is 1-season, and 2-season in Taipei county.