The aim of this thesis is to examine how salesperson control can be exercised in a retail store environment. A case study has been performed on a Swedish fashion company emphasizing the relationship between the company?s upper level management and their retail store operations in order to describe, analyze and classify the prevailing management control mechanisms. The paper presents an agency theoretical approach to the relationship applying behavior- and outcome based control theory, performance measurement theory and incentives theory in order to give a comprehensive image of the control system. The main finding is that the company?s management control system as applied to the sales force in its retail stores can be categorized as mainly behavior-based despite several explicit outcome-based features..

We aim to investigate the risk exposure against commodity prices in the forestry and paper industry. The intension is also to study the affect that the changes in commodity prices has on a company?s market value..

There are some key elements which distinguish a general operating system, such as Linux, from a Real Time operating system, such as OSE. The later belongs to the category of soft Real Time systems while Linux is a general operating system, with significantly improved real time properties after version 2.6. These improvements make it interesting to compare the two systems.When comparing two operating systems, there are a number of issues which have to be considered. One way to measure the performance of the systems is by studying the time consumption for the same functionality and hardware.During the study, the items that appeared as the most important for the performance of the systems, were: process primitives, system primitives, interprocess communication, context switches and interrupt latency.This work demonstrates that it is possible and reasonable to do performance testing on two different operating systems. The implemented tests cover a number of basic functionalities, which appeared to be the most crucial ones for the performance of the systems..

 Performance appraisals- a study of the performance appraisals significance as a tool for development in the public sector.Anders Larsson and Åsalill OlssonPerformance appraisals have been given a central role in leading businesses in the public sector and are seen as a tool to create development opportunities and achieve better results. This has resulted that performance appraisal in many organizations takes up capacity and time. This was the starting point of our interest to study whether the time spent on performance appraisals effectively pays for itself in the organization, in other words whether the effects expected actually are achieved. The paper examines first line managers` views on staff appraisal purposes and effects of a function within the Landstinget. The survey design, methodology and transaction are of qualitative and quantitative method with three different sources: literature review of previous research, interviews with first line managers in Landstinget Västmanland and the results from an employee satisfaction survey conducted on behalf of Landstinget Västmanland.

Ambitionen med vår undersökning har varit att belysa hur beslutsstöd påverkar beslutsprocesser och beslut som fattas i en organisation. Vår studie berör bland annat vilka förutsättningar som krävs för att ett beslutsstöd ska fungera tillfredställande. Vi har även undersökt hur beslut i organisationer med beslutsstöd skiljer sig från rationella modeller för beslutsfattande.Uppsatsen belyser områden som Business Intelligence och Business performance management. Den teoretiska referensramen bygger på centrala reflektioner kring beslutsstödsområdet. Författares resonemang kring beslut, beslutprocesser och andra relevanta ämnesområden tas upp för att öka förståelsen kring beslutsstöd och hur de påverkar organisationer.

The aim of this study is two folded. We wish to investigate if there is a value premium from hedging jet fuel exposure for American and European airlines. We also seek to answer if airlines can affect their probability to default by using Risk Management. During the period 2003 ? 2006 there existed a value premium for airlines that hedged their expected future consumption of jet fuel.

Uppsatsen har undersökt hur tre internetkonsultföretag har hanterat sin klient-, personal- och övergirpande strategi. Efter detta har författarna dragit slutsater för hur ett antal generella framgångsfaktorer inom denna och liknande branscher ser ut..

The communicating home concept has been defined byidentifying the dominating communication technologiesto/from and in the homes, the most important customerbehavior and user needs, the dominating products and thedominating actors of the industry.The evaluation of the communicating home industry has beenperformed with a five forces framework analysis and theoriesregarding value migration and value structures of industries. Ithas been concluded that actors of communication technologies,goods and access services will compete fiercely. The barriersof entry will however be high. When it comes to contentservices the situation is completely different. These actors will,to the largest extent, meet lower competition and low barriersof entry.

In game development, performance is everything and the Playstation 3 provides a unique platform for utilizing parallelization of code to achieve extremely high performance. In this master?s thesis the issue of animation with smooth skinning is migrated from being a GPU process to becoming a parallelized and 358% faster process. This method is incorporated in an existing commercial game engine and integrated in a currently in development title for the Playstation 3. An in-depth study covers parallel processors, the CELL processor, used in the Playstation 3, and how contemporary industry leading game developers are utilizing the same unique architecture to increase their own games? performance..

This thesis attempts to clarify the impact of cultural differenceson customer expectations of service level. Furthermore, wewant to determine whether or not expectations of service differenough to be quantifiable between two countries, Sweden andthe US, mostly regarded as similar in business practices. The conclusion showed that higher ratings on four of Hofstede?s five cultural indexes were associated with higher customer service expectations overall, and in all four SERVQUAL dimensions. This research contributes to retail internationalization and customer expectations theory.

Att sätta personalen i fokus en modell om att möjliggöra för medarbetare? En fallstudie av Svenska Mässan.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performance of queries that are expanded by 1 inflections, 2 compound splitting and 3 inflections and compound splitting combined. For compound splitting, the morphological analyser SWETWOL was used. Queries were executed in the Query Performance Analyser, QPA, containing the InQuery system. Query terms were selected from 29 topics, all of whom containing at least one compound word. Both the queries and the documents were in Swedish.

En undersökning där vi försökt definiera en eller flera faktorer som är kritiska för Lunds centrumhandel. Intervjuer med ett flertal nyckelpersoner samt en omfattande enkätundersökning har genomförts..

Syftet med uppsatsen är att göra en systematisk beskrivning, utifrån ett aktörs- och aktivitetsperspektiv, av ämnet Crisis Management. Detta för att skapa ett djup och en förståelse kring begreppet Crisis Management och dess innebörd i ett svenskt företag. Vi har för avsikt att först utföra en teoristudie för att sedan kunna jämföra denna med praktiken, för att erhålla den bas som behövs för att diskutera och besvara vår problemformulering. Resultatet av ett effektivt Crisis Management blir enligt oss, att Crisis Mangement utgör en psykologisk effekt på företag och dess aktörer. Den trygghetskänsla, vilken Crisis Management genererar, föder en säkerhet hos företag.

Genom personliga intervjuer med revisorer, småföretagare, banktjänstemän och en redovisningskonsult har vi undersökt vad revision och revisorer har för betydelse för småföretag..