This thesis regards pricing, more specifically how to price products no one wish to have use of, but that are invaluable once they come to use. This is a case study that investigates a specific product that is about to enter the market. The product is a fire safety product invented and patented by the company investigated, who also will sell the product. The product is a water-based fluid that due to a cooling effect and can extinguish and prevent fires. This thesis is looking into a product package developed by the company that includes the fluid mentioned above, namely the home defense kit.   Back in the days, pricing used to be a rather simple process where the price used to be based solely on costs. Nowadays, due to technological development, the process of pricing has become more complex.  Increased transparency and the ease to order products from anywhere in the world has developed the art of pricing, which now rarely is based only on costs but on the value which it creates for the customer. The research question of this thesis is as follows: What kind of price models can enable value capturing for products that no one wishes to use? To answer the research question of this thesis, existing theories on pricing and price models have been used as well as empirical data in the form of structured interviews with the company’s executive management team as well as with potential customers from the company’s customer segment. The result has shown that it is important to target the right group of customers and then develop a suitable price model for them. Not one single price model can be 100 percent right for all customers and/or environments. On the basis of Olve et.al’s (2013) Price Model Equalizer, the company’s price model has been identified as well as suggestions on alternative price models suitable for specific groups of customers.

This thesis is aimed at finding out how integration of IT systems creates value for companies and is conducted as a qualitative case study, where six companies are interviewed about their integration solutions. The interviewees were five CIOs and one Managing Director. Four of the companies interviewed have genuine Application Integration solutions, where a middleware platform is the hub of the integration system, while the remaining two used solutions based around a system of point-to-point integrations. The value of an integration solution will be considered a combination of the benefits an integration solution provides, openness aspects, and the price models used to pay for the system. Value is defined as what the company gains, in monetary terms, in exchange for what it pays for an offering (Anderson, Kumar, & Narus, 2007). This definition further defines the attractiveness of an offering as the value minus the price. When discussing the value of an IT system, it is important to consider the difference between the potential value, which is the maximum the system can deliver with an ideal environment and usage, and the realised value, which is some fraction of the potential value that a company actually gains, of the system (Davern & Kauffman, 2000; Smith & Nagle, 2005). Affecting the realisation of potential value are certain factors, called conversion contingencies, which are things like preparation of implementation projects or efforts at using all aspects of a system. Benefits are analysed according to a framework that divides IT systems benefits into five categories: operational, managerial, strategic, IT infrastructure, and organisational benefits (Shang & Seddon, 2000). These categories are focused around, respectively, productivity gains, enhanced planning capabilities, new strategic capabilities, better IT administration, and process improvements. We conclude that most companies gain several large benefits in the operational and managerial types, while the other three types have fewer reported benefits. We conclude that there seems to be quite a lot of unrealised potential value in the integration solutions, if the view of the potential of integration from the technological side is used. We also conclude that companies in certain environments and with more complex organisational structures seem to have a larger value potential than others, meaning they have more to potentially gain from an integration solution. For openness, five aspects of open source software are studied: lock-in, cost, security, flexibility/modifiability, and community. These aspects are mainly derived from literature on open source. The first conclusion we make regarding openness is that most of the CIOs seems not to be fully aware of what the term truly entails. Companies’ opinions regarding open source can be seen on a range between two extremes: those who want to modify or develop software and those who only want to use standard systems. The former category has more to gain from the aspects of cost and modifiability than the latter, but both categories can gain from the lock-in, security, and community aspects. The combination of factors that creates the price of an offering can be described as a price model. To study the value of price models of integration solutions, the SBIFT model (Iveroth, et al., 2013) is used, where the price model is divided into five dimensions, scope, base, influence, formula and temporal rights. None of the interviewed companies were satisfied with the alternatives for price models currently on the market. It was concluded that the dissatisfaction mostly stemmed from the facts that the companies had little opportunity to affect the price model, meaning they could not adapt it to better fit their internal conditions, the complexity of the license agreements, and that it was hard to get vendors to cite a price for a system. Price models that would be more attractive are e.g. models with a larger variable part, like transaction-based ones, or models that affect the time scale of the contract, even though no single model seemed more attractive to all companies.

A presente dissertação tem o objetivo de investigar o impacto da proximidade e da qualidade das escolas no preço das residências do município de São Paulo. Mais especificamente, o estudo avalia como o mercado imobiliário de residências capitaliza a presença e a qualidade das escolas públicas e privadas de Ensino Fundamental de primeira a quarta série. São Paulo combina um sistema de ensino público que tem a regra de matrícula baseada na proximidade da residência à escola com um sistema privado bem desenvolvido, disponibilizando cerca de 800 escolas apenas neste nível de ensino. Utilizando uma extensa base de dados de lançamentos residenciais no período de janeiro de 2002 a março de 2008, foram encontradas evidências de que, em média, o mercado imobiliário da cidade de São Paulo não capitaliza a proximidade nem a qualidade das escolas, tanto públicas quanto privadas. Fatores como a proximidade aos principais centros de empregos da cidade e características da vizinhança, como proximidade a favelas, parecem prevalecer no processo de decisão sobre a localização da residência. Todos esses resultados foram obtidos através da estimação de modelos hedônicos cuja especificação foi definida com base nos modelos de economia urbana e nos princípios de economia espacial. / The aim of this dissertation is to measure how the housing market in the city of São Paulo capitalizes the proximity and the quality of public and private primary schools. São Paulo combines a public system with registration based on the residences proximity to school with a well developed private system, which provides approximately 800 schools as an alternative primary education for children. Using an extensive database of new residential developments during the period of January 2002 to March 2008, the results show evidences that the housing market in São Paulo does not capitalize the proximity neither the quality of primary public and private schools. The results were obtained through the estimation of hedonic models whose specification was defined based on the models of urban economics and the principles of spatial economics

Model selection methods and nonparametric estimation of Levy densities are presented. The estimation relies on the properties of Levy processes for small time spans, on the nature of the jumps of the process, and on methods of estimation for spatial Poisson processes. Given a linear space S of possible Levy densities, an asymptotically unbiased estimator for the orthogonal projection of the Levy density onto S is found. It is proved that the expected standard error of the proposed estimator realizes the smallest possible distance between the true Levy density and the linear space S as the frequency of the data increases and as the sampling time period gets longer. Also, we develop data-driven methods to select a model among a collection of models. The method is designed to approximately realize the best trade-off between the error of estimation within the model and the distance between the model and the unknown Levy density. As a result of this approach and of concentration inequalities for Poisson functionals, we obtain Oracles inequalities that guarantee us to reach the best expected error (using projection estimators) up to a constant. Numerical results are presented for the case of histogram estimators and variance Gamma processes. To calibrate parametric models,a nonparametric estimation method with least-squares errors is studied. Comparison with maximum likelihood estimation is provided. On a separate problem, we review the theoretical properties of temepered stable processes, a class of processes with potential great use in Mathematical Finance.

A presente dissertação tem o objetivo de investigar o impacto da proximidade e da qualidade das escolas no preço das residências do município de São Paulo. Mais especificamente, o estudo avalia como o mercado imobiliário de residências capitaliza a presença e a qualidade das escolas públicas e privadas de Ensino Fundamental de primeira a quarta série. São Paulo combina um sistema de ensino público que tem a regra de matrícula baseada na proximidade da residência à escola com um sistema privado bem desenvolvido, disponibilizando cerca de 800 escolas apenas neste nível de ensino. Utilizando uma extensa base de dados de lançamentos residenciais no período de janeiro de 2002 a março de 2008, foram encontradas evidências de que, em média, o mercado imobiliário da cidade de São Paulo não capitaliza a proximidade nem a qualidade das escolas, tanto públicas quanto privadas. Fatores como a proximidade aos principais centros de empregos da cidade e características da vizinhança, como proximidade a favelas, parecem prevalecer no processo de decisão sobre a localização da residência. Todos esses resultados foram obtidos através da estimação de modelos hedônicos cuja especificação foi definida com base nos modelos de economia urbana e nos princípios de economia espacial. / The aim of this dissertation is to measure how the housing market in the city of São Paulo capitalizes the proximity and the quality of public and private primary schools. São Paulo combines a public system with registration based on the residences proximity to school with a well developed private system, which provides approximately 800 schools as an alternative primary education for children. Using an extensive database of new residential developments during the period of January 2002 to March 2008, the results show evidences that the housing market in São Paulo does not capitalize the proximity neither the quality of primary public and private schools. The results were obtained through the estimation of hedonic models whose specification was defined based on the models of urban economics and the principles of spatial economics

Bakgrund: Under början av 1990-talet influerades offentlig sektor av New Public Management och anammade styrverktyg som initialt användes i näringslivet. Ett sådant styrverktyg som kom att användas var internprissättning. Internprissättning är ett styrverktyg som bland annat används för att kunna allokera kostnader i en divisionaliserad organisationsstruktur. Det finns många olika sätt som man kan arbeta med internprissättning på och det finns inget övergripande optimalt prissättningssystem utan olika prismodeller kan användas i olika situationer. Då internprissättning är ett ämne som är relativt outforskat inom Sveriges kommuner, var det av intresse att studera hur internprissättning som styrverktyg kan användas i den kommunala sektorn. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att skapa en teoretisk modell som förklarar hur en kommun kan arbeta med internprissättning. Samtidigt är syftet att kartlägga hur Växjö kommun arbetar med internprissättning för att sedan, utifrån den framtagna modellen, se hur internprissättningssystemet kan förbättras. Metod: Studien har genomförts som en utvärderingsstudie på Växjö kommuns internprissättningssystem. Detta för att inspektera hur väl internprissättningen faktiskt fungerar samt studera hur man kan åstadkomma önskvärda förändringar och förbättringar. Den teoretiskt framtagna internprissättningsmodellen bygger på teori om internprissättning som har samlats in via facklitteratur och vetenskapliga artiklar. Empirin samlades in via kvalitativa intervjuer av semistrukturerad karaktär. Slutsats: Den framtagna teoretiska modellen inleds med att förklara vilka syften en kommun kan tänkas ha med att bedriva internprissättning. Följaktligen tar modellen upp vilka prismodeller en kommun kan arbeta med, hur internprissättningen kan administreras och kopplas ihop med kommunens budgetarbete för att slutligen gå igenom de positiva och negativa effekter som internprissättningen kan orsaka. Genom att jämföra Växjö kommuns internprissättningssystem med den framtagna teoretiska modellen kunde vi ge förslag på hur kommunens internprissättningssystem kunde förbättras. / Background: In the early 1990s, the public sector was influenced by New Public Management and embraced management control tools that were initially used in the private sector. One of those tools that came into use was transfer pricing. Transfer pricing is a managing control tool that, among other things, is used to allocate resources in a divisional organizational structure. There are many ways you can work with transfer pricing and there is no overall optimal pricing system, however different pricing models can be used in different situations. Since transfer pricing is a topic that is relatively unexplored in Sweden’s municipalities, we found an interest in studying how transfer pricing as a control tool can be used in the municipal sector. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to create a theoretical model explaining how a municipality can work with transfer pricing. At the same time, the purpose is to map how Växjö municipality works with transfer pricing, after which, based on the developed model, see how their transfer pricing system can be improved. Method: The study has been conducted as an evaluation study on Växjö municipality transfer pricing system. This in order to see how well the transfer pricing system actually works and to see how they can achieve desirable changes and improvements. The construction of the theoretical model is based on theory of transfer pricing that was collected through non-fiction and scientific articles. The empirical material was collected through qualitative interviews of a semi structured nature. Conclusion: The developed theoretical model begins by explaining what purposes a municipality have with working with transfer pricing. Consequently, the model identifies the price models a municipality can work with, how the transfer pricing can be administrated and linked with the municipalities budget and finally, what different positive and negative effective outputs you can expect when working with transfer pricing in a municipality.

This thesis deals with the problems of using outsourcing in software development for financial institutions. The thesis is divided into two parts -- theoretical issues and practical issues. The theoretical section is comprised of the first three chapters with the first describing the process of software development -- the life cycle of software, the prominent disciplines and roles involved in software development, the methods of software development and IT Governance. The second chapter defines the specifics which influence the method which is used in software development for financial institutions. The last chapter of the theoretical section deals with the concept of outsourcing - here is the definition of the term, its history, the reasons the financial sector uses outsourcing for software development and the risks thereby incurred. In addition to this, the advantages and limitations of individual models of outsourcing are also described namely regarding geography and the service o be provided. The practical section is comprised of the survey the aim of which was to acquire an insight into the issues of using outsourcing both from the point of view of the domestic financial sector as the client and from the point of view of the IT service provider. The surveys are included with this thesis.

Komplexa värdekedjor och utsläppstung produktion har länge präglat vårt samhälle och utgör grunden till flera globala svårigheter. Syftet med detta självständiga arbete är att undersöka hur prismodeller och prissättningskalkyler kan användas som underlag i prissättning och produktlansering av fossilfria modulära produktionsanläggningar. Studien identifierar 4 prismodeller inom försäljning av fossilfria modulära produktionsanläggningar och hur dessa kan realisera ett värdeerbjudande för ett företag i uppstartsposition.  I studien behandlas priset för en produktionsanläggning som tvådelat. Ett pris för att förvärva anläggningen och redovisas i prismodell A och B. En licensavgift för att bedriva operativ verksamhet och presenteras i prismodell C och D.  Prismodell A behandlar ägande i from av direkt förärvning (evigt ägande) och prismodell B behandlar leasing. Båda modellerna genererar en omedelbar intäktsström till fallföretaget som på grund av sin uppstartsposition vill undvika att låsa upp stora mängder kapital. Av dessa två framgår att prismodell A utsätter kunden för en ekonomisk risk men bidrar till en högre lönsamhet på lång sikt. Att erbjuda kunden ett leasingalternativ (Prismodell B) eliminerar den ekonomiska risken och öppnar upp fallföretaget för en större marknad. Detta alternativ raderar en del av lönsamheten som i stället går till den intermediära parten. Prismodell C och D behandlar licensavgiften som vars pris kommer korrelera till företagets allmänna marknadsposition. Modell C prissätter licensavgiften från ett marknadsperspektiv. I och med fallföretagets låga operativa kostnader identifieras penetrationsprissättning som en ovanligt fördelaktig strategi. Modell D behandlar en värdebaserad prissättning och presenterar lokal- och fossilfri produktion som två stora kundvärden. Värdet på dessa behöver revideras och utvärderas i varje ny kundrelation. / Complex value chains and emission-intensive production have long characterized our society and underpin several global challenges. The purpose of this independent study is to investigate how pricing models and pricing calculations can be used as a basis for pricing and product launch of fossil-free modular production facilities. The study identifies four pricing models within the sale of fossil-free modular production facilities and how these can realize a value proposition for a start-up company.  The study addresses the price of a production facility as twofold. A price for acquiring the facility is presented in pricing models A and B. A licensing fee for operational activities is presented in pricing models C and D.  Pricing model A deals with ownership in the form of direct acquisition (perpetual ownership), and pricing model B deals with leasing. Both models generate an immediate revenue stream for the case company, which, due to its start-up position, seeks to avoid locking up significant amounts of capital. Of these two, it is evident that pricing model A exposes the customer to financial risk but contributes to higher long-term profitability. Offering the customer a leasing alternative (pricing model B) eliminates the financial risk and opens up a larger market for the case company. However, this alternative erases part of the profitability, which instead goes to the intermediary party.  Pricing models C and D address the licensing fee, which will correlate with the company's overall market position. Model C prices the licensing fee from a market perspective. Given the case company's low operational costs, penetration pricing is identified as an unusually advantageous strategy. Model D deals with value-based pricing and presents local and fossil-free production as two significant customer values. The value of these needs to be revised and evaluated in each new customer relationship.