Creating revenue diversification forces nonprofit leaders to create innovative programs and services, build resilience against adverse conditions, and establish a sustainable future. The problem is that some nonprofit managers lack strategies for developing a diversified financial portfolio to achieve sustainability. The purpose of this single-case study was to explore the revenue diversification strategies used by 3 leaders of a nonprofit organization in the eastern region of the United States through the conceptual lens of Markowitz's modern portfolio theory and Thaler's behavioral finance theory. Data were collected using purposeful sampling, semistructured interviews, and analysis of organizational documents, social media platforms, and online databases. Four categories were used to organize the data: process strengths, process opportunities, results strengths, and results opportunities. The key themes that emerged from process strengths and results strengths were utilizing volunteers, collaborating with local partners, developing diverse revenue streams, strong fiscal management, program innovation, and evaluating the market. The key themes that emerged from process opportunities and results opportunities were the lack of written processes and procedures, the lack of process improvement strategies and performance measurement outcomes, the lack of knowledge about donor attrition and retention, and high turnover in the executive director position. Organizational leaders who focus on diversifying revenue streams can serve the mission instead of chasing funding streams that have become more competitive. The social change implication of these findings is that nonprofit leaders could create sustainability through diverse revenue streams, ensuring long-term employment, and sustaining positive social impacts.

Bakgrund: När forskare inom den kognitiva psykologin, Amos Tversky och DanielKahneman, på 60-talet sammanliknade deras modeller ombeslutsfattande under risk och osäkerhet med ekonomiska modeller omrationellt beteende föddes en ny gren inom den moderna finansteorin.Anomalier på finansmarknaden har därefter försökts förklaras medteorier inom behavioural finance. En av dessa anomalier är den omöverreaktion och gjordes känd av De Bondt och Thaler 1985. Den sägeratt investerare överreagerar på ny information, vilket leder till attaktiepriser överstiger sina fundamentala värden. En kraftig uppgång avaktiekursen följs således av en nedgång och vice versa. Syfte: Syftet är att utreda om det råder överreaktion på Stockholmsbörsenssamtliga samlade aktier på kort sikt under tidsperioden 2003-2014, samtundersöka de bakomliggande orsakerna till resultatet. Metod: För varje vecka under åren 2003-2014 har de 5 aktierna med högst (lägst)avkastning på Stockholmsbörsen placerats i en vinnar- (förlorar)portfölj.Portföljerna har sedan följts upp under 10 veckor. En signifikant skillnad(ACARvinnare - ACARförlorare > 0) ger stöd åt överreaktionshypotesen. Slutsats: Resultaten visar att vinnar- och förlorarportföljerna uppvisar en överreaktionseffekt den första uppföljningsveckan, men att denna effektförsvinner när portföljerna värdeviktas, vilket tyder på ensmåbolagseffekt och inte en överreaktionseffekt. / Background: In the 1960’s, when psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemancompared their cognitive models of decision-making under risk anduncertainty with economic models of rational behavior a new field withinmodern financial economics was born. Theories within behaviouralfinance have since tried to explain financial anomalies that pointedtowards inefficient markets. One such anomaly is the overreactionhypothesis and was first proposed by De Bondt & Thaler in 1985. Itstates that investors overreact to new information and that security priceswill therefore “overshoot” their fundamental values. An extreme rise ordrop in price is followed by a reversal in the opposite direction. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate whether an overreaction effectcan be observed on the entirety of the Stockholm stock exchange andwhat causes it. Completion: For each week in the years 2003-2014 the 5 stocks with the highest(lowest) return on the Stockholm stock exchange have been placed inwinner (loser) portfolios to be evaluated the succeeding 10 weeks. A significant difference between abnormal returns (ACARlosers - ACARwinners>0) is seen as support for the overreaction hypothesis. Conclusion: The results show that the winner and loser portfolios show proof of anoverreaction effect the first week in the evaluation period. This effect,however, disappears completely when the portfolios are value-weighted,indicating signs of a small-firms effect rather than an overreaction effect.

The work seeks toward further developing a novel robotic platform capable of stable three legged locomotion. This will be accomplished by creating a robust and adaptable robotic platform capable of executing different walking strategies and taking multiple continuous steps. Previous iterations of this platform have been developed, all of which have used a single gait strategy. This study will seek to develop two new strategies. The first of which is a modification of the original strategy with theoretically improved gate robustness. A second strategy will seek to implement more advanced control techniques to create a fully stable balanced gait. / Master of Science

Humans have now amassed a sizable knowledge of widespread, nonconscious cognitive biases which affect our behavior, especially in social and economic contexts. I contend that a democratic government is uniquely justified in using knowledge of cognitive biases to promote pro-democratic behavior, conditionally justified in using it to accomplish ends traditionally within the scope of government authority, and unjustified in using it for any other purpose. I also contend that the government ought to redesign institutional infrastructure to avoid triggering cognitive biases where it is not permitted intentionally to manipulate such biases and to optimize the effects of such biases where permissible. I shall use the United States of America as an example throughout, but my conclusions apply equally to any democracy which values the political autonomy of its populace.

In the theoretical part, this diploma thesis deals with a literary analysis and comparison of books Momo, Timm Thaler, or the Traded Laughter and The Thief Lord. The pieces of work are analysed on the basis of their common features. Such features include the main characters, and the magical motifs which affect real life situations. The partial subjects of observation are film versions of the works. The thesis is concluded by the practical part addressing a didactic adaptation of the novel Momo; including worksheets and other teaching aids designed for pupils of elementary schools and grammar schools. The teaching aids are based on the theory and involve a didactic analysis, methodical analysis and time plans for their utilization in German language classes. KEYWORDS Children's literature, Momo, Michael Ende, Timm Thaler, James Krüss, The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke, magic elements in literature, The didactics of children's literature.

This study sets out to explore attitudes and intentions towards nicotine product goods and how it is affected by the goal framing effect. The presence of this effect has been shown in the advertising of both green products and everyday products. The aim of this research is to explore whether or not this also holds true when it comes to unhealthy products, more precisely tobacco free all white nicotine products.    A quasi experimental study was conducted with the use of a fictitious brand of All-white tobacco. All 63 participants in the three different experimental groups of the study met the mandatory age requirement. One of the three groups received a positively framed advert, another received a negatively framed advert, whereas the last group acted as the control group and therefore received a neutral advertisement stimuli. All participants submitted their answers on a questionnaire created for this study, which was validated using Cronbach’s alpha and factor analysis.   The results suggest that the use of goal framing is beneficial when advertising nicotine product goods. Both positive and negative goal-framing showed a greater effect on purchase intention and product attitude than the control group. The negative goal-framing advert proved to be statistically different than the control group when measuring product attitude. Furthermore, the positively framed advert showed a statistically significant difference in effect on both product attitude and purchase intention compared to the control group.    The findings suggest that positively framed goal-framing has an effect on both attitudes and purchase intention, compared to the neutral stimuli. The negatively framed goal-framing had an effect on attitudes, compared to the neutral stimuli. The practical implication of this study could possibly be that when constructing advertisements for tobacco free snus products, it could be preferable to make use of the positive goal-framing effect in order to affect the consumers purchase intention and attitude towards the product.   This study has confirmed to some extent that the framing effect is a factor prevalent in the advertising of tobacco free products. For further research it would be highly interesting to delve deeper in comparing positive and negative goal-framing in order to find further evidence of which one has greater effect on consumers.

One-nucleon halo nuclei are exotic nuclei which can be seen as a core around which orbits a loosely-bound valence nucleon. They are usually studied through reactions such as elastic scattering and breakup. The ratio method has been developed as a tool to study one-neutron halo nuclei at high energies. It consists of the ratio of angular cross sections, breakup and elastic scattering, which removes most of the sensitivity to the reaction mechanism and to the reaction model. In the simple recoil excitation and breakup (REB) model, the ratio simplifies to a form factor dependent solely on the wave function of the projectile. By measuring this observable and comparing it to the REB form factor, i.e. in the ratio method, more detailed information on the structure of the halo could be obtained. For neutron-halo nuclei at high energy, the ratio observable obtained from accurate CDCC and DEA theoretical calculations follows its REB prediction. I study the extension of this method to lower energies of the reaction which could make the measurement appropriate to facilities such as SPIRAL2 (GANIL, Caen, France) and ReA12 at FRIB (Michigan State University) and to proton halos. This is done by comparing the REB form factor to dynamical calculations of the ratio. The reactions investigated are the reaction of 11Be, the archetypical one-neutron halo nucleus, on 12C, 40Ca and 208Pb targets at 20 MeV/nucleon and of 8B, the archetypical one-proton halo nucleus, on 12C, 58Ni and 208Pb targets at44 MeV/nucleon.For these reactions, the adiabatic assumption is no longer valid due to the effect of the Coulomb interaction. This effect is mainly visible at forward angle for 11Be and is aggravated for 8B by the fact that the halo is charged. The ratio works less well than for neutron-halos at intermediate and high energies. Nevertheless, the ratio is shown to be very sensitive to the orbital angular momentum l0 in which the halo is bound and its binding energy E0, i.e. the single-particle structure of the projectile. Variations of l0 and E0 induce visible changes in shape and in magnitude (up to several orders) of the ratio. Also, the agreement of the ratio with its REB prediction is best when the projectile is loosely-bound and for low l0, i.e. for s and p waves. The validity of the method is not affected by the use of energy ranges—or bins— in the projectile continuum. These tend to increase the cross section without changing the agreement of the ratio with its REB prediction. The applicability of the method is finally explored at high energy for proton-rich nuclei 17F, 25Al and 27P. I show that the ratio method works the latter since this nucleus is bound by a mere 0.870 MeV in the s-wave. For the other nuclei, although the agreement of the ratio with its REB prediction is less good than for neutron-halo nuclei at high energy, it still provides estimates of nuclear-structure features, such as l0 and E0 and could be applied in what can be called an approximate application of the ratio method. Heavy nuclei exhibit a neutron skin, i.e. a thin layer around the nucleus where only neutrons are found. The thickness of the skin is highly correlated with the slope of the symmetry energy. The process of coherent neutral-pion photoproduction is used to extract the nuclear density and hence the neutron-skin thickness of heavy nuclei. In order to analyse recent data on the photoproduction on 12C, 40,48Ca, 116, 120, 124Sn and 208Pb, I build a reaction code. My model uses the formalism of Kerman, McManus and Thaler (KMT) which allows to build the photoproduction matrix on a nucleus from the ones describing the elementary process on a single nucleon. Within the impulse approximation, the photoproduction is seen as the coherent sum of the photoproduction on each of the nucleons. In the plane wave impulse approximation (PWIA), no rescattering of the pion is considered after its production and the cross section is directly proportional to the Fourier transform of the density. Such process is taken into account at the distorted wave impulse approximation (DWIA) by considering a potential simulating the pion-nucleus interaction and built from the KMT formalism.The agreement of my model with the data is good, especially for 208Pb. The distortion has a significant impact on the photoproduction process. The sensitivity of the process to the density of the target is analysed by performing the calculations with several different densities calculated in different structure models. The distortion has the effect of deteriorating this sensitivity. In the particular case of a 208Pb target, the impact of variations of the neutron-skin thickness of around 0.1 fm on the photoproduction cross section is ten times smaller than the size of the error bars on the experimental data. These results, although less dramatic, hold for the tin targets, for which preliminary data exists. In the light of these results, the coherent neutral-pion photoproduction process does not seem to be suited in the study of the neutron-skin thickness. This conclusion goes in contrast to the results of recent measurements on 208Pb, for which the method was shown to be sensitive to fine details of the density. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished