Reputação tornou-se, no contexto contemporâneo, um valor que norteia os discursos e as atitudes de organizações e indivíduos na contemporaneidade. Para as organizações capitalistas tornou-se um ativo de geração e manutenção do seu valor de capital numa ambiência cada vez mais orientada pela intangibilidade, imaterialidade e no entendimento das significações produzidas pelos variados sujeitos contemporâneos integrados pelas redes de relacionamento virtuais suportadas pelas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação-TICs. O grande objeto tranformador dessa realidade, a comunicação, tornou-a um instrumento de poder e validador de legitimidade, inclusão ou exclusão. Ela tornou-se processo, saindo de sua ação funcional para exercer àquela demandada pelas organizações: a de agente de interação, entendimento e do nível de porosidade interna do entendimento das significações e demandas do ambiente externo. A pesquisa conduzida neste estudo projeta reputação sob as interpretações e as essências surgidas das falas dos sujeitos gestores das organizações, das classes e daqueles em interação em ambiente virtual de uma rede colaborativa, comparadas à norma e ao discurso global do Reputation Institute. Buscou-se entendimento sob a ótica dos individuos gestores da Comunicação e da Comunicação bem como das classes que os representam. Procurou-se tambem entender como o termo se manifesta na contemporaneidade, a partir do levantamento dos estudos produzidos no Brasil e em quais campos eles mais são produzidos. Com relação aos sujeitos organizacionais foram considerados os da gestão da Comunicação Corporativa, da gestão de Marca e Comunicação Institucional e da gestão de Relação com Investidores do Itaú- Unibanco; o gestor de Marketing/Comunicação e do negócio da Lecom-Comunicação Digital; da Comunicação Corporativa da SAP Brasil; representantes da Abracom-Associação Brasileira das Agências de Comunicação, do Conrerp/Sudeste/Sul-Conselho Regional de Relações Publicas e do IBRI-Instituto Brasileiro de Relações com Investidores. Reputação se manifesta, na pesquisa, como norma. Ela apresenta indicadores para uma gestão diferenciada de reputação, a partir das essências dos sujeitos participantes. Como norma, reputação se mostra como instrumento que assegura o controle de comportamentos de forma a alinhar práticas e discursos e atitudes que garantam confiança e credibilidade de acionistas, investidores, publicos de relacionamento e da sociedade. Na integração de todos os sujeitos, o estudo mostrou que é possível a arquitetura de um modelo gestor de reputação integrador sustentado nas variaveis humanas, que leve à evolução de todos os sujeitos a partir dos valores e normas que permeiam cada agrupamento e a partir do qual gera confiança e pode tornar a organização referencial de construção de novos valores e padrões normativos integrados / Reputation has become in a contemporary context, a value that guides speeches and attitudes of organizations and individuals in the contemporary present. For capitalist organizations it has turned in an asset of generation and maintenance of its capital value in an ambience of increasing orientation by intangibility, immateriality and understanding of meanings produced by varied contemporary actual subjects integrated by virtual relationships networks supported by Communication and Information Technologies - CITs. The great transforming object of this reality, the communication, it made the communication an instrument of power and a legitimacy, inclusion or exclusion validator. It has changed to a process, moving from its functional action role to perform those demanded by organizations such as: agent of interaction, and of the level of understanding internal porosity of the meanings and demands of the external environment. The research led in this tesis highlights reputation under interpretations and essences extracted from organizations managing subjects, their representative classes and those interacting in a collaborative virtual environment network speeches, compared to the standard and the global discourse of the Reputation Institute. The understanding was based on the perspective of Communication and the Capital Management individuals. Also sought to understand how the term is manifested (expressed) in contemporary times currently, based on the researches produced in Brazil and in which fields they are produced more , available in the research environment google. Regarding to organizational subjects this reseach considered the Management of Corporate Communications , Brand and Corporate Communications Management and Management Itaú Unibanco Investors Relationship; Manager of Marketing /Communications and Business of Lecom - Comunicação Digital; Corporate Communication of SAP Brazil; representatives of Abracom - Associação Brasileira das Agências de Comunicação; CONRERP / South East / Southern -Conselho Regional de Relações Públicas and IBRI - Instituto Brasileiro de Relações com Investidores. Reputation is manifested in the research as a norma. It presents elements for a noteworthy reputation management, based on the essences of the participating subjects. As a norm, reputation is seen as a path to ensure control of behaviors in order to align practices, discourses and attitudes to assure confidence and trust of shareholders, investors , stakeholders and society . The study demonstrated that is possible to design an integrating reputation management model supported by human variables and subjects integration, leading to the evolution of all subjects based on the values and standards instilled in each group and from which can generate confidence and may place the organization as a reference leader for new values and integrated normative standards

An important part of maintaining network security is collecting and processing information about cyber threats, both from network operator's own detection tools and from third parties. A commonly used type of such information are lists of network entities (IP addresses, domains, URLs, etc.) which were identified as malicious. However, in many cases, the simple binary distinction between malicious and non-malicious entities is not sufficient. It is beneficial to keep other supplementary information for each entity, which describes its malicious activities, and also a summarizing score, which evaluates its reputation numerically. Such a score allows for quick comprehension of the level of threat the entity poses and allows to compare and sort entities. The goal of this work is to design a method for such summarization. The resulting score, called Future Maliciousness Probability (FMP score), is a value between 0 and 1, assigned to each suspicious network entity, expressing the probability that the entity will do some kind of malicious activity in a near future. Therefore, the scoring is based of prediction of future attacks. Advanced machine learning methods are used to perform the prediction. Their input is formed by previously received alerts about security events and other relevant data related to the entity. The method of computing the score is first described in a general way, usable for any kind of entity and input data. Then a more concrete version is presented for scoring IPv4 address by utilizing alerts from an alert sharing system and supplementary data from a reputation database. This variant is then evaluated on a real world dataset. In order to get enough amount and quality of data for this dataset, a part of the work is also dedicated to the area of security analysis of network data. A framework for analysis of flow data, NEMEA, and several new detection methods are designed and implemented. An open reputation database, NERD, is also implemented and described in this work. Data from these systems are then used to evaluate precision of the predictor as well as to evaluate selected use cases of the scoring method.

The opinion of customers about companies are very important as this can influence a company’s profit. Companies often get customer feedback via surveys or other official methods in order to improve their services. However, some customers feel threatened when their opinions are publicly asked and thus prefer to voice their opinion on the internet where they take comfort in anonymity. This form of customer feedback is difficult to monitor as the information can be found anywhere on the internet and new information is generated at an astonishing rate. Currently there are companies such as Brandseye and Brand.Com that provide online reputation management services. These services have various shortcomings such as cost and is incapable of accessing historical data. Companies are also not allowed to purchase these software and can only use the software on a subscription basis. The design proposed in this document will be able to scan any number of user defined websites and save all the information found on the websites in a series of index files, which can be queried for occurrences of user defined keywords at any time. Additionally, the software will also be able to scan Twitter and Facebook for any number of user defined keywords and save any occurrences of the keywords to a database. After scanning the internet, the results will be passed through a similarity filter, which will filter out insignificant results as well as any duplicates that might be present. Once passed through the filter the remaining results will be analysed by a sentiment analysis tool which will determine whether the sentence in which the keyword occurs is positive or negative. The analysed results will determine the overall reputation of the keyword that was used. The proposed design has several advantages over current systems: - By using the modular design several tasks can execute at the same time without influencingeach other. For example; information can be extracted from the internet while existing resultsare being analysed. - By providing the keywords and websites that the system will use the user will have full controlover the online reputation management process. - By saving all the information contained in a website the user will be able to take historicalinformation into account to determine how the keywords reputation changes over time. Savingthe information will also allow the user to search for any keyword without rescanning theinternet. The proposed system was tested and successfully used to determine the online reputation of many user defined keywords. / MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The opinion of customers about companies are very important as this can influence a company’s profit. Companies often get customer feedback via surveys or other official methods in order to improve their services. However, some customers feel threatened when their opinions are publicly asked and thus prefer to voice their opinion on the internet where they take comfort in anonymity. This form of customer feedback is difficult to monitor as the information can be found anywhere on the internet and new information is generated at an astonishing rate. Currently there are companies such as Brandseye and Brand.Com that provide online reputation management services. These services have various shortcomings such as cost and is incapable of accessing historical data. Companies are also not allowed to purchase these software and can only use the software on a subscription basis. The design proposed in this document will be able to scan any number of user defined websites and save all the information found on the websites in a series of index files, which can be queried for occurrences of user defined keywords at any time. Additionally, the software will also be able to scan Twitter and Facebook for any number of user defined keywords and save any occurrences of the keywords to a database. After scanning the internet, the results will be passed through a similarity filter, which will filter out insignificant results as well as any duplicates that might be present. Once passed through the filter the remaining results will be analysed by a sentiment analysis tool which will determine whether the sentence in which the keyword occurs is positive or negative. The analysed results will determine the overall reputation of the keyword that was used. The proposed design has several advantages over current systems: - By using the modular design several tasks can execute at the same time without influencingeach other. For example; information can be extracted from the internet while existing resultsare being analysed. - By providing the keywords and websites that the system will use the user will have full controlover the online reputation management process. - By saving all the information contained in a website the user will be able to take historicalinformation into account to determine how the keywords reputation changes over time. Savingthe information will also allow the user to search for any keyword without rescanning theinternet. The proposed system was tested and successfully used to determine the online reputation of many user defined keywords. / MIng (Computer and Electronic Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

With the advent and development of modern information technology, such as the Internet, the difficulty in transmitting data has been reduced significantly. This makes it easier for entities to share their experience to a larger extent than before. In this thesis, we study the design and analysis of feedback mechanisms, which are the information systems that enable entities to learn information from others' experience. We provide a framework for feedback mechanisms. We first provide an abstract model of a feedback mechanism which defines the scope of our concept and identifies the necessary components of a feedback mechanism. We then provide a framework for feedback mechanisms. This provides a global and systematic view of feedback mechanisms. We also use our model and framework to decompose and analyse several existing feedback mechanisms. We propose an electronic marketplace which can be used for trading online services such as computational resources and digital storage. This marketplace incorporates a dispute prevention and resolution mechanism that is explicitly designed to encourage the good conduct of marketplace users, as well as providing important security features and being cost-effective. We also show how to incorporate the marketplace into Grid computing for exchanging computational resources. We propose a novel feedback mechanism for electronic marketplaces. In this setting, the role of feedback is no longer a “shadow of the future”, but a “shadow of the present”. In other words, feedback directly impacts on the seller's payoff for the current transaction instead of future transactions. This changes the fundamental functionality of feedback, which solves many inherent problems of reputation systems that are commonly applied in electronic marketplaces. We provide a novel announcement scheme for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) based on a reputation system in order to evaluate message reliability. This scheme features robustness against adversaries, efficiency and fault tolerance to temporary unavailability of the central server.

Aim: The aim of this study is to identify how a professional ice hockey club with fans nationwide can position its brand successfully and to discover if this is in line with what the consumers think is important in the branding of the club. Method: A mixed method has been used for this case study, in the forms of interviews and a questionnaire. The interviews have been written out in essay form for presentation and analysis of the qualitative data. The quantitative data has been collected and processed with a questionnaire using APSIS and analysed with Microsoft Excel. Results / conclusions: This research has identified a framework containing all factors that influence the perception of the brand by consumers. Evidence was found for all these factors in this research. Furthermore, the most important factors of the branding of a professional ice hockey club with fans nationwide have been highlighted. Consequently, this research shows that the marketers of such an ice hockey club can position their brand by developing clear points-of-difference that stand out from the competition. Suggestions future research: Research into the perception of the sports branding by the younger target group is suggested, as well from people outside Gävle. Furthermore, the research could be conducted in other (ice hockey) clubs. Finally, the research could be conducted again in a few years. Contribution of thesis: This research fills the gap in the literature about the development of a successful brand of a professional ice hockey club with fans nationwide. The main contribution for managers is that brands can only be used to maintain fans, not to attract them.

This study analyzes the link between cause assessment, corporate philanthropy, and dimensions of corporate reputation from different stakeholders' perspectives, using balance theory as a conceptual framework and the telecommunications industry in Austria and Egypt as the empirical setting. Findings show that corporate philanthropy can improve perceptions of the corporate reputation dimensions, but the results vary between customers and non-customers and depend on the country setting. (authors' abstract)

This thesis is comprised of three essays. These essays model facets of illicit markets using economic theories of reputation and go on to develop new theories of reputation. In chapter 1, we start by defining illicit markets. We build a model of trade in an illicit market where honesty is enforced through reputation. We then show how criminals' heterogeneity in their ability to avoid detection can have interesting consequences. In particular, such heterogeneity can explain why illicit market participants might sometimes adopt surprisingly blatant trading strategies. Heterogeneity among criminals in terms of how they are affected by enforcement can give rise to counter-intuitive market reactions to changes in the level of enforcement. Chapter 2 considers the market for stolen payment data such as credit card numbers. The central observation is that stealing financial data and using it for personal gain are two very different skills. An online market exists through which those who steal data can sell it to those who can ``cash in''. The low prices in these markets are not evidence of a failure of the reputational system, but of large outside options on one side of the market. Finally chapter 3 considers reputation more generally. We find folk theorem and incomplete information models place too much faith in the knowledge and rationality of short-lived players. We propose instead a new model with more realistic assumptions about the information available to short-lived players and their ability to use it. This model generates natural cycles in the reputation of the rational long-lived player.

The current system of credit ratings is full of conceptual and administrative flaws with highly rated companies defaulting in the short term. This has led regulators, investors, companies and researchers aiming to improve the system. This thesis details the study of this aim to improve the existing credit ratings system through a conceptual perspective, as well as developing it into a more comprehensive and overarching new corporate ratings methodology. In doing so, organisational performance appeared to be an apparent solution, to be considered as the main basis on which to derive new ratings for a company. However organisational performance has its own conceptual disagreements between managers and researchers concerning the dimensions to be measured for overall organisational performance. Therefore, this study attempted two tasks: to establish a link between ratings and organisational performance, and to identify what should be measured for overall organisational performance. This resulted in the development of new corporate ratings methodology based upon the overall organisational performance measurement in case of publicly traded companies. A mixed methods research strategy combined with a qualitative analyses of 10 selected company cases and 24 interviews; and quantitative analyses of the performance of 128 publicly traded companies from the UK, the USA and the India stock exchanges in 4 manufacturing and 3 service industries was adopted in the development, testing and application of ‘new company ratings’ and ‘overall organisational performance measurement’ propositions. Secondary data was obtained from companies’ annual reports, sustainability reports, social responsibility reports, performance reports available from companies’ official websites; and company profiles generated by trade analyst companies such as Bloomberg and Morningstar. Primary data was collected from company managers, industry experts, trade analysts and investors through telephonic or face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Company reports and interview transcripts were analysed using qualitative content analysis. A metaphor was applied to understand and to derive the concept of overall organisational performance measurement in terms of stability, resilience and sustainability. A secondary data survey of 128 companies was conducted to test three hypotheses of organisational performance (OP) based ratings, stability – resilience – sustainability as main dimensions of OP, and the application of an overall OP score to derive new corporate ratings. Performance data for 54 dimensions for 128 companies was collected and analysed, applying reliability analysis, principal components analysis, multiple discriminant analysis and non-parametric independent sample tests of Mann-Whitney U and Kruksal-Wallis. All hypotheses were accepted proving the concept and model based on statistical and subjective significance. Findings suggest there is a strong link between corporate ratings and organisational performance (OP), and OP measurement could be utilised to provide improved and overarching new corporate ratings as compared to existing credit ratings. A significant difference was found to exist between new corporate ratings and existing credit ratings, with new corporate ratings having a better predictive accuracy of company performance over a three years duration. Sustainability was found to contribute more towards measurement of organisational performance as compared to the traditional dimension of stability, comprising financial and operational performance. Very high reliability and principal component scores for sustainability proved that organisational effectiveness can be measured as one of the contributing dimensions to overall organisational performance. Other findings suggest that there is a clear divide between researchers studying OP as a variable and developing a framework in which to measure it. Overall OP can be measured by applying the conceptual lenses of stability, sustainability and resilience, comprising various sub-dimensions. Major and novel contributions of this research are: a new approach in providing corporate ratings based upon overall organisational performance, and a new concept of measuring overall organisational performance in terms of stability, resilience and sustainability.

Master of Science / Department of Journalism and Mass Communications / Joye C. Gordon / As technology advances in social media, crisis management professionals and researchers are charged with revamping or discovering new communication tools to address the dissemination crisis information. Social media provides a platform for open conversations, community, and connectedness among individuals and permits anyone to become the source of information during a time of crisis. Crisis news can be shared and reshared among millions of people without the need of a professional source, such as a journalist. A crisis may disrupt social order to an organization’s reputation and legitimacy, but a crisis also provides an opportunity for growth or renewal. Previous literature has analyzed crisis communication affects on organizational reputation through cases studies; however, there is lack of analysis in using an experimental design. Through an experiment with 207 undergraduate students, this study empirically evaluates the dissemination of crisis communication through Twitter and its effect on organizational communication. Using McLuhan’s (1967) concept of the medium is the message, this study highlights past findings, explicates types of crises, and focuses on the medium as a variable (not content of response) of interest to provide groundwork for an experimental inquiry into how the medium itself (as opposed to message content) impacts the efficacy of organizational crisis responses. A 2x3 experimental design with two research conditions- types of crisis: (1) intentional and (2) unintentional and source types: (1) organization (2) journalist, and (3) friend was used in this study. An online questionnaire was administered through an online survey service to approximately 2,000 undergraduates. Participants were randomized in one of six conditions based on the type of crisis (unintentional and intentional) and the source (organization/journalist/friend) of the message and directed to read an unintentional or intentional press release. Findings indicated that the perception of responsibility is a valid factor to consider during a possible crisis. Overall, as the previous studies have concluded, the organization is perceived as responsible for the crisis.