In the early 1990?s more and more companies of the Swedish public sector were exposed to competition, and this started the debate on how such actions might affect the business and even society.The first chapter examines how the public sector and especially health care, is financed and managed. We also explore what it means to be exposed to competition and find that there are many different ways of exposing the public sector to competition. The study examines dental care as an example of a market with both publicly and privately owned companies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how publicly and privately owned health care companies view their relationship with their consumers.

Syftet med uppsatsen var att kartlägga vilka faktorer som konsumenter prioriterar när de väljer hotell.De respondenter som besvarade enkätundersökningen var författarnas vänner på community-sajten Facebook. Detta gjorde att urvalet blev snedvridet och den största ålderskategorin var 20-29 år. Vi tycker att detta gjorde studien mer intressant då vi har fått fram tydliga resultat kring vad denna åldersgrupp tycker är viktigt.Respondenterna i åldersgruppen 20-29 år tycker att Plats, Pris och Personer var de tre viktigaste faktorerna som de prioriterade vid val av hotell..

Bakgrund: Dagligen diskuteras utländsk makroekonomiska data i svensk media, där förväntningarna på utvecklingen av dessa sätts i sammanhang med utvecklingen på den svenska börsen.Syfte: Målet med den här studien var att utröna i hur stor utsträckning denna information kan anses vara betydande för en aktieinvesterare med kapital på den svenska börsen. Hänsyn togs även till börscykler samt varierande tidsperioder.Genomförande: Med grund i the Arbitrage Pricing Theory genomfördes multipla regressionsanalyser, med det svenska indexet OMXS30 som beroendevariabel. Undersökningarna baserades på månadsdata för perioden april 1991 till och med augusti 2006. Den makroekonomiska datan försköts därtill en period för att ta hänsyn till variablernas eventuella fördröja effekter på Stockholmsbörsen.Resultat: Integrationen mellan börserna visade sig ha ökat över tiden, med undantag för extraordinära perioder som IT-boomen, där makroekonomiska fundamentaldata istället slås ut. En positiv utvecklingen av långräntan samt konsumentförtroendet i USA tyder på en samtida börsuppgång i Sverige.

Bakgrund: Det senaste decenniet har allt fler stormarknader och lågprisbutiker öppnat vilket har lett till att de mindre livsmedelsbutikerna blivit utsatta för större konkurrens. Parallellt med att stormarknaderna tagit marknadsandelar i dagligvarubranschen har även större fokus riktats mot ökat samarbete och informationsdelning i försörjningskedjan, så kallat Supply Chain Management (SCM). Inom dagligvarubranschen har Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) utvecklas ur samma idéer som SCM men med fokus på livsmedel och dess försörjningskedjor. I grund och botten handlar ECR om företagens gemensamma arbete för att integrera verksamheter, minska kostnader samt producera största möjliga nytta för slutkonsumenten. Med tanke på den ökade konkurrensen i dagligvaruhandeln samt det faktum att det finns ont om tidigare forskning om små och medelstora företag (SME:s) relaterat till SCM/ECR, är det intressant att undersöka hur dessa företag påverkas av samarbetet.

The ever-growing e-commerce brings many opportunities for society's consumers and businesses. Digitization has strongly contributed to these opportunities and has, among other things, facilitated the search for information and increased the range for the customer. While the opportunities are many, the increased consumption has also brought consequences. The increase in consumption contributes, among other things, to quantities of deliveries and returns as well as increased waste, all of which results in environmental destruction. The issue of sustainability is very topical today and is influenced by almost everything today. In connection with the markets changing, the consumers' behaviors and expectations also change.

Due to increasing regulations regarding new diesel vehicles particulate matteremissions the new Scania truck, Scania Euro 6, has been equipped with a particulatefilter. This component effectively stores the particles in the exhaust gas but must becleaned in order to prevent itself from clogging. The filter is cleaned through aprocess named regeneration which is a thermodynamic process in which thetemperature of the filter is raised through fuel supplied to the exhaust gas.The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the development of improved controlstrategies of the temperature during the regeneration process through thedevelopment of model-based controllers. These controllers are designed in order tohave good performance in stationary as well as automatic regeneration.In order to develop these model-based controllers a model of the system isconstructed. The model is described as a linear thermodynamic grey-box model withflow varying parameters, showing good results in validation.The model provides a simulation environment during the controller design, which isfocused around the development of linear regulators with the exhaust gas mass flowas a scheduling variable whose size determines controllers? mode of operation.

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att ta reda på vilka faktorer och risker som påverkar köpbeslutet för en konsument gällande en ny innovativ produkt. Uppsatsen kan på så sätt bidra med kunskap och förståelse för företag som vill utveckla den här typen av produkter. Studiens inriktning och syfte togs fram i samarbete med textilföretaget FOV Fabrics. Med utgångspunkt ur syftet och problemet genomfördes en enkätundersökning som kompletterades med semi-strukturerade intervjuer med fyra av enkätrespondenterna. Resultatet av enkätundersökningen analyserades och jämfördes med resultatet av intervjuerna.

Climate change has become an increasingly topical subject. Recently debate on how our food affects the environment has flared. It has been shown that how the food we eat is grown and transported could be one the bigger contributors to the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The aim of this study is to see how consumer?s choices of vegetables affect release of carbon dioxide. The results show that emissions of carbon dioxide can be lowered by consuming vegetables that have been grown on open land. Vegetables that have to be grown in heated greenhouses in Sweden should perhaps be exchanged for such that have been grown in unheated greenhouses in southern Europe, even though the transport distance is significant. .

This thesis has enlightened how consumer behavior is when buying clothes via the Internet and the problems and difficulties that could face the companies. This study was conducted through interviews with people that have bought clothes through the Internet, traditional catalogues and real stores. The conclusions showed that the Internet is as suitable as traditional catalogues for buying clothes. Another dimension were put to the aspect of availability to a virtual mall in the design of the catalogues. Finally, it is in the best of the e-business companies interest to study how e-catalogues should be structured and designed for the consumers..

 This paper is about the conflict between the Middle East and the Western world after the Danish newspapers? cartoon publications of the prophet Muhammed in October 2005. The conflict resulted in massive reactions in the Middle East and the Danish-Swedish dairy company Arla Foods, was boycotted during six months in 2006. The aim of this study is to describe how the biggest Swedish daily newspaper,Dagens Nyheter and three Saudiarabic newspapers Al-Hayat, Al-Watan and Shark Al-Awsat described "the Other" during the crisis in the year of 2006. Another aim is to describe how Arla Foods managed the consumer boycott.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze and understand how producerbrands are able to communicate their brand through today's marketing channels, also how development and changes that occur in the society can affect the producers communication abilities. We have seen a tendency that many retailers have created their own brands that are competing with the producers, this leads to the fact that producers in some cases are having trouble communicating their brand to the end-consumer. The fact that the producers marketing through retailers now is more limited than before, the producers now have to capture the consumers wants and needs through other channels.This essay is based on a qualitative method involving seven interviews. The persons that we've chosen to interview are carefully selected based on their specific knowledge about the subject in question..

Shopping for groceries often means that, as consumers, we travel to the grocery store ourselves, by ear, bike or on foot. At the store we pick out the groceries that we want, go the register and pay for them. During the last couple of years consumers in Sweden have been given the opportunity to let someone else select and transport the groceries to their home instead, so called home shopping. As this report is being written, the possibility to buy groceries this way is somewhat limited, but many forecasters believe that in the near future it will increase immensely. Because of the large volumes of groceries that are being transported, there is great transport work being done in the supply chain.

For the Swedish artist Björn Lövin, the personal was a problem. In his first exhibition in Moderna Museet, Lövin observed through the fictitious character Mr. P (for »Personality«) the ruptures in the Swedish welfare state. The exhibition Konsument i oändligheten och Herr P:s penningar (Consumer in Infinity and Mr. P?s Money) (1971) was composed of two environments, through which a veridical working class apartment and a high street with life-sized mannequins and furniture characteristic of its time, visualized the societal discrepancies in the welfare state as well as the art world of the early 1970s.

We are currently more aware than ever about the impact of food on our health, but in the same time this trend put more pressure on the food retailers to do as much as possible to help their customers manage their weight and be healthy in general. This study aims to examine the corporate social responsibility for consumer health in food retailing, in which ways the companies promote healthy eating; in what extent they do it and also the motives for companies for corporate responsibility. The empirical study is limited to the market leading companies in Sweden, Coop and ICA, because the performance of the leading companies puts them in the strongest position to profit from shifting consumer trends, grow revenues and penetrate new markets and also enable them to make a strong case for the effectiveness of voluntary action, obviating the need for government intervention. A qualitative method was used in this study to get an accurate understanding how the food retailers take social responsibility for consumers health. The study is based on interviews with experts in the food retailers Coop and ICA, and the companies reporting in this area, annual reports, corporate responsibility reports and websites.

Syftet med studien har varit att utreda vilka möjligheter som finns för småföretag att använda sig av elektronisk affärskommunikation i form av EDI. Vi erbjuder genom uppsatsen denna grupp företag, småföretagen, en introduktion till EDI och hoppas på så vis hjälpa dem att komma igång med elektronisk affärskommunikation. Med småföretag avses i denna studie den definition som NUTEK presenterar, nämligen företag med mindre än 50 anställda eller som har en omsättning som understiger tio miljoner euro.Utöver att undersöka vilka möjligheter som finns för småföretag tittar vi även på hur förutsättningar och tekniska aspekter påverkar småföretagens inställning till ett införande av en EDI-lösning. För att finna svar på våra frågeställningar utför vi en kvalitativ studie som baserar sig på en triangulering av tre metoder (observation, tidigare studier och intervjuer).Vår empiriska studie bygger på fyra urvalsgruppers syn på EDI och de möjligheter som dessa anser att en EDI-lösning medför.Vi har genom vår studie funnit att det finns goda möjligheter för småföretag att använda sig av EDI. Det finns webbaserade lösningar såväl som affärssystem med stöd för EDI, vilka lämpar sig för småföretag.