Inledning: Flertalet studier visar att den finansiella kunskapen bland dagens konsumenter av finansiella tjänster är högst bristfällig vilket leder till ett kunskapsunderläge i mötet med en finansiell rådgivare. Dessutom är konsumenten i ett informationsunderläge då rådgivaren har information om bland annat avgifter och incitamenten bakom valet av en viss placering. Dessa underlägen ger upphov till en asymmetrisk relation och det är denna asymmetri samt dess konsekvenser som studeras i denna uppsats. Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att från rådgivarnas perspektiv beskriva den asymmetri som förekommer i relationen mellan rådgivare och konsument samt vad denna asymmetriska relation får för konsekvenser för konsumenterna. I tillägg till detta belyses även de konsekvenser som införandet av provisionsförbudet kan ge upphov till. Metod: Genom en kvalitativ tvärsnittsstudie med deduktiv ansats har empiri samlats in genom sju stycken semi-strukturerade intervjuer med finansiella rådgivare. Empirin har sedan analyserats med hjälp av kodning för att kunna beskriva och karaktärisera asymmetrin mellan rådgivare och konsument samt de konsekvenser denna leder till för konsumenterna. Slutsats: Informationsasymmetrin är ett problem som måste överbryggas, kunskapsasymmetrin är däremot en förutsättning för tjänstens existerande. Båda asymmetrier medför konsekvenser för konsumenterna, tar dock konsumenterna eget ansvar kan dessa asymmetrier överbryggas och negativa konsekvenser förhindras. Lagar och regleringar som till exempel provisionsförbudet behöver nödvändigtvis inte vara en optimal lösning för branschen då de även medför nya problem. Hårdast drabbas småspararna då de saknar en betydande förmögenhet och därför inte utgör en lönsam kundgrupp. Att småspararna inte får rådgivning kan leda till samhällsekonomiska konsekvenser eftersom de utgör majoriteten av befolkningen och deras privatekonomi har direkt påverkan på landets ekonomiska tillväxt. / Background:Studies have shown that the financial knowledge among today's consumers of financial services is highly inadequate. This means that in the relationship between the advisor and the consumer there is a substantial difference in knowledge. The consumer also has less information regarding fees and incentives behind the choice of products, compared to the advisor. These disadvantages create an asymmetrical relationship and it is this asymmetry and its consequences for consumers that are being studied in this paper. Aim: The purpose of this paper is to describe the asymmetry that exists in the relationship between the financial advisor and the consumer from the perspective of the advisers. This paper also studies what impact the asymmetry has on the consumers. In addition, the consequences resulting from the implementation of the prohibition of commission accepted from third parties are studied. Methodology: Through a qualitative cross-sectional study with a deductive approach empirical evidence is gathered through seven semi-structured interviews with financial advisors. The empirical data were then analyzed to describe the asymmetry between advisors and consumers as well as the resulting consequences. Results: The authors have been able to conclude that the information asymmetry is a problem that must be overcome, the knowledge asymmetry on the other hand is what is enabling the service to exist. Both asymmetries have consequences for consumers, but if consumers take on the responsibility they can decrease the asymmetry gap and prevent negative consequences. Laws and regulations are not necessarily an optimal solution for the industry since they also cause new problems. The consequences are biggest for the small savers as they lack a substantial fortune and do not represent a profitable customer base. If small savers do not receive counseling it might lead to economic consequences for the society because they represent the majority of the population and their personal finances have direct impact on the country's economic growth.

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Most of the theory that concerns auditing relates to agency theory where auditors' role is to mitigate the information asymmetry between principals and agents. During the last decade, we have witnessed technological advancements across the society, advancements which also have affected the auditing profession. Technology and accounting information systems has decreased information asymmetry in various ways. From an agency theory point of view, this would arguably reduce the demand for auditing. In the same time, the audit profession is expanding into new business areas where auditors perform assurance services. The purpose of this paper is to investigate auditors' role in a technological environment. Interviews have been used to explore auditors' perception of the role. The result indicates that auditors' role still is to mitigate principal-agent conflicts, though, information asymmetries are expanding to comprehend more and to a wider stakeholder group due to technology. The end goal is still the same, that to provide trust to the stakeholders, technology enable new ways of reaching there and broadens the scope towards systems and other related services. That is the perceived role of auditors in today´s technological environment.

The public's demand for accountability will have a significant impact on research universities' revenue resources in the future. Driving the demand is a perceived lack of institutional productivity. Undergraduate students' graduation rates represent one product of public research universities. States have already latched onto these rates as a measure of institutional performance; and as a result, states have provided a basis for public research universities to use the relationship between dollars invested in the institution and undergraduate students' graduation rates to respond to accountability issues. Current research provides little insight into this relationship. Research in this study uses concepts from the higher education production function, the resource dependency theory, and the Principal-Agent Model to investigate undergraduate students' four-year and six-year graduation rates as an institutional product. The research provides a greater degree of transparency into the relationship between dollars invested in public research universities and undergraduate students' graduation rates than has previously been shown. As a result of this relationship analysis, the research enables the development of a model for predicting undergraduate student graduation rates relative to dollars invested in the institution from different sources.

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to identify the obstacles against supplier compliance, which focal companies encounter within the upstream supply chain when attempting to collect the requested product contents information. Based on this problem, the objective is to identify the most useful supply chain management practices to ensure supplier compliance.Method: The theoretical framework contains the Principal-Agent theory and Responsible Supply Chain Management. The empirical findings are derived through semi-structured interviews that were conducted with three Swedish corporations operating in China and one Swedish-Chinese consulting firm.Results: The two main-obstacles to supplier compliance were firstly found to consist of lacking supplier understanding of the product contents information requirements (PCIR). These obstacles prevented the supplier from understanding the risk at hand and what behaviour that triggered the risk. The second main-obstacles were found to be the prevalence of different opposing interests, which could all be traced back to the reluctance to assume an increase in costs, and could induce the supplier to pursue that interest rather than the interest to comply to the PCIR. With these obstacles in mind, the main objective of the focal company’s supply chain management practices should preferably be to create risk in relation to the PCIR, ensure supplier understanding and pay attention to the opposing interests. The most useful type of supply chain management practice for fulfilling these objectives were the use of incentives, preferably in combination with sanctions, to create risk. Training was considered most useful for ensuring supplier understanding, although a combination of training, personal communication and written documents is potentially interesting. Regarding the opposing interests, accommodating practices were found most useful rather than attempt to persuade the supplier to give up the interest.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The transformation of local government in South Africa has established a complex model of multiple principals exercising municipal budget oversight on municipal managers. However, earlier research has not sufficiently focused on the phenomenon of the multiplicity of principals and its wider institutional architecture, relationship dynamics and effects in order to understand the institutional constellations of oversight principals, their behaviour and their interactions on the municipal budget process. Particularly, an empirical exploration focusing on understanding the experiences and perceptions of municipal managers and oversight principals on oversight through the multiple principal model remains elusive. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the experiences and perceptions of municipal managers, municipal councillors and the Provincial Treasury on the multiple oversight principals’ model, its manifestations, dynamics and effects on municipal budget oversight. The study utilised principal-agent theory to develop a conceptual and theoretical framework, and utilised the interpretive qualitative case study of the Western Cape to guide the research process. A sample of respondents consisting five (5) municipal managers, one (1) Provincial Treasury representative and ten (10) municipal councillors from municipalities in the Western Cape were interviewed for the study. The transcribed data from the 16 interviews were analysed, using a qualitative analysis method. The study findings reaffirmed the existence of multiple principals bequeathed with authority to exercise of municipal budget oversight in the Western Cape Province. Strong evidence emerged that application of the multiple principal model manifests independent, conflicting and fragmented budget oversight relationships and behaviour between the Provincial Treasury and municipal councillors during different stages of the municipal budget process. While the study acknowledges that the model and its application generates both positive and negative effects resulting in too complex, onerous and conflict-prone oversight relationships, it also highlighted these effects as necessary intrinsic attributes that do not necessarily have to manifest adverse consequences on the municipal budget oversight. These findings contradict the common-sense advocates for a collective model that emphasises coordination to improve cohesiveness among oversight principals, especially between the Provincial Treasury and the municipal councillors. The findings confirm that the Municipal Finance Management Act has consciously established a responsive system that distributes oversight among autonomous political structures in order to comprehensively eclipse the discretion of the municipal manager with varied and complementary oversight expertise, energy and diversity.

This thesis studies the labour supply with aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences. The first contribution of the thesis is the theoretical modelling of behavioural contract theory. In Chapter 1, I modify the classical principal-agent model with uncertainty and moral hazard by replacing the Expected Utility preferences of the agent with chance theory preferences (Schmidt and Zank, 2013). Chance theory agents are primarily concerned with the sure wage they can obtain, i.e., the certain component in their contract, as they treat increments in bonuses markedly different to similar changes in sure wages. Similar to the classical predictions, our agents' optimal contracts are contingent payment schemes, however, they differ with respect to the level of the sure wage. I also contrast my predictions to those of the model of Herweg et al. (2010), who assume agents with expectation-based loss-averse preferences. The other contribution of this thesis is the empirical support for the theory of aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences with field data in education economics. In Chapter 2, I study aspiration-based reference-dependent preferences in undergraduate students' performance and effort provision. Students' reference points are set as their targeted grades. I extend a two-period economics-of-education model (Krohn and O'Connor, 2005) by proposing an additional utility function that is based on the difference between the realised grade and targeted grade. I design surveys and collect data by following a group of undergraduate students at the University of Manchester for two semesters of a full academic year with a two-period panel. My results provide evidence for students' reference-dependent preferences in two ways: first, a significant jump in students' proxied utility of grade is found at the reference point, which also implies students are loss averse. Second, the reference point positively affects students' effort provision. I further study the formation of the reference point and its variation over time. My results suggest that students partially update their past realised results into the formation of reference points. Further, the relative change of their reference points depends on the achievement of the past period reference point.

This dissertation seeks to explain variation in legislative strategies to control policymaking across institutional contexts. Of these many strategies, I focus particularly on the use of statutory language meant to direct agency action and on the use of oversight hearings. I argue that while low levels of oversight activity need not imply that a legislature is helplessly abdicating policymaking responsibility to unelected agencies, this may be the case in some circumstances. With the goal of establishing when the lack of oversight may mean such normatively problematic abdication, I develop a signaling model of delegation and oversight which proposes that oversight depends on institutional features (such as legislative capacity, the existence of legislative term limits and a legislative veto), political features (such as policy conflict within the government and within the legislature and the policy preferences and activism of important judicial actors), and the legislature's initial delegation of policymaking discretion to an agency. Critically, the pursuit of either strategy depends on alternative strategies available as well as on the likely actions of other institutions with the power to affect policy outcomes. The dissertation extends our theoretical understanding of legislative-executive relations and provides one of the first large-scale empirical analyses of legislative policymaking. In the first empirical chapter of this dissertation, I assess the predictions of the theory concerning congressional oversight activity from 1947-2006. I find that both the extent to which a congressional committee's ideology diverges from an agency's and the policy-specific expertise of said committee affect the number of oversight hearing days the committee holds, but only when policy disagreements are sufficiently conflictual. This last condition suggests, contrary to previous research, that the extent to which oversight should be necessary, to either legislative policymaking or democratic legitimacy, varies across preference arrangements. In the next empirical chapter, I switch my focus from the analysis of a single legislature over time to a cross-sectional study of the extent to which U.S. state legislatures delegate authority to bureaucratic agencies. Here, I find that the amount of discretion that a legislature delegates to an agency charged with implementing Medicaid policy is nonlinearly related to the extent to which state courts are likely to affect policy outcomes, as captured by a new measure of judicial activism. These analyses confirm that legislatures consider alternative methods of control as well as the likely actions of external institutions when crafting their policymaking strategies.

<p>Denna kontraktsekonomiska studie behandlar fotbollsklubben och företaget Manchester United, en av världens största och framgångsrika klubbar alla kategorier. Syftet med uppsatsen är att dels kartlägga Manchester Uniteds kontraktsnät, dels att begripliggöra de kontraktsrelationer som särskiljer Manchester United från vanliga nuvärdesmaximerande företag utifrån kontraktsekonomisk teori. </p><p>Den ekonomiska teori som ihuvudsak används i uppsatsen är kontraktsekonomisk teori som innefattar teorier om kontraktsnät, principal-agentrelationer och transaktionskostnader. </p><p>Uppsatsen tar främst upp det som skiljer Manchester United från ett traditionellt företag. De kontraktsparter som vi fokuserar på är spelare, supportrar och sponsorer då dessa kontraktsparter är unika för företag som Manchester United. Kontrakten Manchester United har med sina spelare är till skillnad från traditionella anställningskontrakt tidsbegränsade. En förklaring till detta är att spelaren är användbar för Manchester United under ett fåtal år. Spelarkontrakten är även icke uppsägningsbara. En förklaring till detta är att det är en riskfylld verksamhet att vara spelare och spelarna har haft tillräcklig styrka i kontraktsrelationen för att få fotbollsklubben att stå för risken. </p><p>Ekonomiska framgångar är åtminstone på lång sikt beroende på att de sportsliga framgångarna fortsätter. Sportsliga framgångar ger tillströmning av nya kunder och ger Manchester United möjlighet att skriva förmånliga sponsoravtal vilket påverkar företagets ekonomi på lång sikt. </p><p>Det finns även många likheter mellan traditionella företag och Manchester United. Till skillnad från en del andra fotbollsklubbar verkar de ekonomiska och sportsliga målen gå hand i hand för företaget och fotbollsklubben Manchester United då framgångarna kontinuerligt har kommit både på och utanför fotbollsplanen.</p>

<p>The Swedish Code for Corporate Governance was introduced on July 1, 2005. All companies then listed at OM Stockholmsbörsen A-list and those on the O-list with a market value of more than three billion SKr must implement the rules in the Code. The Code includes rules for corporate governance as a complement to the legislation. The Code is based on the principle comply or explain. This means that the companies are aloud to diverge from the rules if they explain why. The reason for this principle is that it enables a much higher level of ambition in the Code than if it would be legislated.</p><p>The Swedish Code for Corporate Governance has introduced much tougher rules on internal control than the existing legislation demands. The Code demands a good internal control without defining what it means. The idea is that the companies themselves are responsible for developing a standard for good internal control. It also includes that the board should sign an annual report about the companies internal control and establish a special internal audit function for evaluating the internal control system.</p><p>The main purpose with this paper is to study the implementation of the Code in Swedish companies concerning the rules on internal control of the financial reporting.</p><p>The paper is limited to the companies listed at OM Stockholmsbörsen former A-list which apply with the Code. Five companies are being interviewed on their work with internal control. All companies at the former A-list are included in the study of the existence of an internal audit function.</p><p>The paper is based on both secondary and primary data, mainly focused on the latter. The secondary data is collected from literature, journals, internet and annual reports from the companies included in the study. Primary data has been collected via e-mail and telephone contacts. One of the interviews was done via telephone and the others through meetings at the companies head offices.</p><p>The study shows that exactly half of the companies have an internal audit function and the existence of the function is strongly related to the ownership structure. Only companies with a wide spread in ownership and nationalized companies has the function.</p><p>There is a great uncertainty about what good internal control means. A suitable solution to apply with the rules in the Code is therefore to use COSO’s definition and recommendations on internal control. The framework also includes guidelines on how to evaluate and improve internal control.</p>