The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The thesis aims to increase our understanding about parents reasoning about the elementary school choice by studying which factors parents perceive as important during the decision making process and also by giving meaning to Pierre Bourdieu?s concept of capital through the parents perspective. The empirical material comes from seven BNIM-interviews made with parents, which has been analyzed according to the thematic field analysis.The results show that the parents are not especially concerned about making an active school choice. Stability, closeness, friends, rumors, development and adaptability to the reality are the factors that are perceived as the most important in the decision making process. The school choice has a limited meaning as an investment in social capital, from Bourdieu?s perspective.

Gender balance within the business administration field at university level is an area that has gained increased attention in the last decade. As gender balance contributes positively to the scientific and educational achievements within all disciplines, many studies have tried to understand the decision-making processes of students when selecting a business specialisation. However, little attention has been devoted to the finance discipline although there is a remaining gender imbalance within the field at higher-level economic studies. This thesis was performed as a qualitative case study and is based on interviews with second-year bachelor students facing their choice of specialisation at the Stockholm School of Economics. Through an application of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this study aims to examine factors that influence female business students' intentions to choose a specialisation.

Summary Title: How to make decisions on software based servicedevelopment in the mobile handset industry.?The Rapid Model for Holistic Application Evaluation Authors: Per-Inge AnderssonPatrik Dreveborn Tutors: Björn Regnell, Department of Computer Science,Lund UniversityRobert Wenglén, School of Economics and Management,Lund University Problem formulation: Academically the questions of finding out what constitutes a sound decision base and finding out how to handle the issue of a holistic approach must be addressed in order to make a well balanced and relevant decision model. The core question is which decision criteria to include and which drivers are important in estimating the status of the criteria? Practically to provide Sony Ericsson with a formalized evaluation process for decisions on software development that is transparent, objective and challengeable. Purpose: Academically to contribute to the field of decision making research by elaborating on how to make a holistic, rapid and rational decision model.

Thesis purpose: The aim of this paper is to extend the knowledge of what influences the purchase decision of functional food in the store. By applying the M-R model in a new setting - the dairy department in grocery retailing in Sweden - and adding variables related to health attitudes, the aim is to contribute to existing research concerning in-store purchase decision making and store environment as well as consumer attitudes. Methodology: This thesis employs a quantitative strategy with a deductive approach and data has been collected with questionnaires. Theoretical perspective: Environmental psychology serves as an overarching framework where, more specifically, certain aspects of store atmospherics and some variables concomitant to health attitudes provide the theoretical base. Empirical data: The empirical data consists of customer purchasing a functional food product, Proviva, and this is contrasted with a test group, Bravo.

This thesis examines the conditions for participation in the decision making process of a possible mine establishment in Storuman municipality in the north of Sweden. This is done through a case study where the main actors are the mining company Nickel Mountain AB, the municipality Storuman and the Sami village Vapsten. As a theoretical framework Cecilia Eriksson?s division of democratic theories is used as a starting point. Methods as described in deliberative democratic theory, such as discussion by effected community members, are seen as a method within the participatory democratic tradition, not a theory of its own.

This paper examines possible applications of fuzzy logic on the field of artificial intelligence in digital games. It describes fuzzy logic in contrast to crisp logic. The paper will give several examples of possible applications of fuzzy logic-based decision making for game AI. These examples include the choosing of weapons for AI agents and the gas-break decision of an AI-controlled car. The paper will also analyze the impacts of game AI which makes decisions based on many factors.

Introduction: A general guideline was introduced on October first 2010 regarding a mortgage cap, limiting the degree of leverage of housing as collateral. Through the new guidelines the marked conditions concerning consumers? choice of mortgage has changed. The consumers are limited in the sense that they can?t only use mortgage when purchasing a house.

Making decisions have always been part of human life. Political decisions consist of many participants with both formal and informal ways to highlight problems and reach the political agenda. Processes difficult for an individual to distinguish and understand surround political decision-making. The purpose of this study is to investigate the decision process for a specific political issue, Swedish wine producers' desire to be able to sell their own wine at their vineyard; gårdsförsäljning. This is currently prohibited in the Swedish model due to an alcohol monopoly.

It is important, for companies operating on a homogeneous product market, to understand and adapt to customer needs. Since coffee is a homogeneous product in food retail it is vital for coffee companies to work extensively with differentiation and the fierce competition. The prevailing homogenity makes it difficult for companies to develop the product itself and must therefore work to create added value to the product.The purpose of this thesis is to carry out a study on consumer decision-making when purchasing homogeneous products, and to examine how companies work to strengthen their brand and gain market share in a homogeneous product market. The market that this thesis highlights is the coffee market.To answer the purpose of this thesis the writers have conducted a questionnaire survey regarding consumers? decision-making process and interviewed two marketing managers for two major actors on the coffee market.

Data sets are continuously increasing within organizations. Data sets will also be in larger amounts,have shorter lifetime, is becoming more varied and holds various degrees of uncertainty. Together,these dimensions are included in the term Big Data. There is no universally accepted definition ofBig Data and how it should be used. Applications that turn out to be part of a Big Data conceptoften begin as investments in an organization in order come to new insights or create new businessperspectives.

Business Intelligence may help organizations in making the right decisions byproviding data for analysis which can be presented to decision makers. DataWarehouse which is a central part of Business Intelligence can be built in severalways but the methods presented by Ralph Kimball and Bill Inmons are considered thetwo main methods. The solution provided by Inmon focuses on integrating the entirebusiness into one large database using relational database development. Kimballhowever proposes dimensional database modeling by creating one or more data martsand integrating these using a data bus. Previous research has shown that the quality ofa Data Warehouse can be measured through critical factors such as data quality andsystem quality.

The aim of this essay is to study the decision making process and implementation of the principle of political participation and influence for Roma minority in Sweden. The results regarding the decision making process is structured through a discourse influenced policy analyses. Problem picture and recommended measures in the political documents representing the decision making process are analysed through theories of minority rights and equality. The implementation is seen through, by the author given minority discourse and the work in the roma council and analysed by the same theories already mentioned.The results show that regarding the decision process the aim of art.15 in the framework convention is based on the idea of equality while the Swedish documents relates more to an idea of the right to speak for the group. Regarding recommended measures, the framework convention gives several recommendations on specific measures for political participation while the Swedish documents focuses on the general politics of the state.

This thesis aims to describe and characterise the impact of the Kurdish question for Turkey's decision-making process and foreign relations from the 1980's until today. The Kurdish question as perceived by Ankara, is separatist, and poses a security threat to the entire country but has also international dimensions, which are responded with foreign policy actions by Turkey. Initially, a systemic view is considered in order to investigate Turkey's position in this issue in a global perspective. Moreover, this is completed with an ?Internal Politics Perspective?(Joe D Hagan), which gives a deeper understanding of the actual structures and actors in Turkish domestic policy that shape the foreign policy.

The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding about consumer buying behaviour when purchasing books online. In order to acquire data for the study we used a questionnaire that 75 students where asked to respond. The respondents were students at the University of Technology in Luleå. Our findings suggest that the following factors are the most commonly cited reasons for deciding to complete the purchase: trust, perceived risk, price, convenience, design of the website and experience. The following factors are the most commonly cited rea-sons for deciding not to complete the purchase: trust, perceived risk, price and the design of the website.