PROPAGANDA ELEITORAL NA DEMOCRACIA MIDIÁTICA: A VITÓRIA DA EMOÇÃO NA ELEIÇÃO PRESIDENCIAL DE 2014 NO BRASIL

Essa pesquisa tem como objeto a comunicação política com foco na propaganda eleitoral, no contexto da democracia midiática. Partindo deste princípio, delineia-se o problema de pesquisa: estudar como a propaganda eleitoral tem se apropriado do contexto da democracia midiática para expor suas mensagens, o uso entre a razão e a emoção, a venda de sonhos ao eleitor entre outros assuntos como as críticas ao adversário e as promessas que realizam. O objetivo da pesquisa é destacar os tipos de conteúdos elaborados para serem transmitidos aos eleitores que assistem ao horário eleitoral gratuito, analisar os argumentos, a qualidade e o teor de tais veiculações, assim como destacar as distinções entre eles, avaliando assim sua efetividade, suas principais características, o que os diferenciava e quais os recursos que usavam para atrair a atenção e o voto dos eleitores. A metodologia adotada foi a análise de conteúdo, uma vez que se deseja compreender quais são os principais sinais e características definidos pelos partidos e pelos candidatos no momento de serem divulgados. Foram definidas seis categorias para a análise de dez vídeos do horário eleitoral gratuito na televisão dos três principais candidatos, tanto do primeiro, quanto do segundo turno. Conclui-se que a candidata Dilma Rousseff foi a que mais aproveitou de todos os artifícios estratégicos da comunicação política, da propaganda eleitoral, apropriada da democracia midiática, com forte apelo emotivo nas categorias analisadas, resultando em uma vitória apertada, a mais disputada até hoje, porém, de resultado positivo para a campanha de reeleição da presidente

O Projeto Sete Villas

A crescente valorização dos recursos patrimoniais tem adotado uma importância particular nas últimas décadas, especialmente no que diz respeito às áreas rurais. Estas áreas são vítimas de processos de descaracterização devido à ausência de dinamismo económico e à consequente perda significativa de população. A conceção de novas estratégias implica um conhecimento aprofundado do potencial endógeno destes territórios para que seja possível perceber até que ponto os elementos da paisagem e o seu substrato natural podem ser entendidos e valorizados patrimonialmente, contribuindo desta forma para o desenvolvimento local sustentável através do aproveitamento turístico. Apesar de nos últimos anos ter sido verificado um crescente interesse pelas áreas rurais, tanto para viver como para visitar, ainda persiste uma imagem negativa destes territórios. E é necessário, portanto, pensar imagens de marca fortes e coerentes que apostem no carácter diferenciador destes espaços. O objetivo desta investigação passa pela avaliação da importância que o marketing territorial pode representar no desenvolvimento de pequenos territórios com potencialidades culturais. Estas constituem uma estratégia de promoção destes locais, contribuindo significativamente para o desenvolvimento dos próprios territórios, uma vez que para o aumento da atratividade territorial poderá induzir a um maior investimento e a um maior número de visitantes. A área de estudo selecionada para uma avaliação mais aprofundada será a região do Alentejo, que desembocará num projeto cultural criativo com ênfase no distrito de Portalegre. Este Projeto tem como fundo de base, a promoção turístico-cultural de um conjunto de pequenas vilas tradicionais pertencentes ao distrito, agrupando as mesmas numa rede coletiva de identidade comum. Este processo exige um estudo elaborado no que diz respeito aos recursos de vertente e potencialidade cultural destes territórios de modo a que consigamos transformá-las numa nova imagem de marca. Mais importante que o próprio património material e imaterial já previamente reconhecido são as pequenas narrativas locais que nos esclarecem quanto à sua história e identidade dos próprios residentes. O produto final será a construção de uma nova rede turístico-cultural que agrupe estas pequenas vilas num só roteiro. Para tal, é necessária a construção de um guia cultural criativo, onde a nova imagem destes locais se constrói pelas pequenas histórias e narrativas de interesse cultural. Na prática este produto será concretizado de três formas, impresso, online, e sob a forma de uma aplicação para mobile phone.

Consumer Behavior and Firm Competition

Understanding consumer behavior is critical for firms' decision making. How consumers make decisions about what they want and buy directly affect the profits of firms. Therefore, it is important to consider consumer behaviors and incorporate them into the model when studying the optimal strategy of firms and competition between firms. In this dissertation, I study rich and interesting consumer behaviors and their impact on firms' strategy in two essays. The first essay considers consumers' shopping cost which leads to their preference for one-stop shopping. I examine how store visit costs and consumer knowledge about a product affect the strategic store choice of consumers and, in turn, the pricing, customer service and advertising decisions of competing retailers. My analysis offers insights on how specialty stores can compete with big-box retailers. In the second essay, I focus on a well-established psychology phenomenon, cognitive dissonance. I incorporate the idea of cognitive dissonance into a model of spatial competition and examine its implications for selling strategy. I provide new insight on the profitability of advance selling and spot selling as well as the pricing of bundle and its components. Collectively, two essays in this dissertation introduce novel ways to model consumer behaviors and help to understand the impact of consumer behaviors on firm profitability and strategy.

The Affordable Care Act and the Transformation of US Health Care

The neoliberal period was accompanied by a momentous transformation within the US health care system.  As the result of a number of political and historical dynamics, the healthcare law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 ‑the Affordable Care Act (ACA)‑ drew less on universal models from abroad than it did on earlier conservative healthcare reform proposals. This was in part the result of the influence of powerful corporate healthcare interests. While the ACA expands healthcare coverage, it does so incompletely and unevenly, with persistent uninsurance and disparities in access based on insurance status. Additionally, the law accommodates an overall shift towards a consumerist model of care characterized by high cost sharing at time of use. Finally, the law encourages the further consolidation of the healthcare sector, for instance into units named “Accountable Care Organizations” that closely resemble the health maintenance organizations favored by managed care advocates. The overall effect has been to maintain a fragmented system that is neither equitable nor efficient. A single payer universal system would, in contrast, help transform healthcare into a social right.

Paradoxos num Sistema de Gestão de Vendas na Perspetiva dos seus Agentes

O departamento de vendas de uma organização é, de fato, uma porta aberta de comunicação com o ambiente circundante. São os interlocutores desta comunicação, ou seja, quem vende e quem compra, que marcam de uma forma decisiva o (in)sucesso empresarial num mundo globalizado. É com base neste cenário que surge a intenção de analisar um sistema de gestão de vendedores/as e compreender, afinal, se a performance de vendedores/as é mais determinada pela forma como o sistema de gestão funciona do que pela própria responsabilidade de quem vende. Através de entrevistas semiestruturadas a um grupo de vendedores/as e gestor e consequente análise de conteúdo, procurei responder às premissas perspetivadas. Concluí que, muito embora advogada a existência do modelo soft selling por parte da gestão, na realidade o que se verifica é o estímulo para o hard selling. O sistema analisado funciona com uma comunicação deficitária que contribui para algumas anomalias no sistema de vendas, como são as queixas de clientes. Acredito que o estudo efetuado pode contribuir para a deteção de pontos-chave a melhorar no processo de sales management control e, globalmente, para o aumento da produtividade com qualidade.

Response process and test-retest reliability of the Context Assessment for Community Health tool in Vietnam

BACKGROUND: The recently developed Context Assessment for Community Health (COACH) tool aims to measure aspects of the local healthcare context perceived to influence knowledge translation in low- and middle-income countries. The tool measures eight dimensions (organizational resources, community engagement, monitoring services for action, sources of knowledge, commitment to work, work culture, leadership, and informal payment) through 49 items. OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to explore the understanding and stability of the COACH tool among health providers in Vietnam. DESIGNS: To investigate the response process, think-aloud interviews were undertaken with five community health workers, six nurses and midwives, and five physicians. Identified problems were classified according to Conrad and Blair's taxonomy and grouped according to an estimation of the magnitude of the problem's effect on the response data. Further, the stability of the tool was examined using a test-retest survey among 77 respondents. The reliability was analyzed for items (intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and percent agreement) and dimensions (ICC and Bland-Altman plots). RESULTS: In general, the think-aloud interviews revealed that the COACH tool was perceived as clear, well organized, and easy to answer. Most items were understood as intended. However, seven prominent problems in the items were identified and the content of three dimensions was perceived to be of a sensitive nature. In the test-retest survey, two-thirds of the items and seven of eight dimensions were found to have an ICC agreement ranging from moderate to substantial (0.5-0.7), demonstrating that the instrument has an acceptable level of stability. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides evidence that the Vietnamese translation of the COACH tool is generally perceived to be clear and easy to understand and has acceptable stability. There is, however, a need to rephrase and add generic examples to clarify some items and to further review items with low ICC.

Sneakerheads and Custom Kicks: Insights into Symbolic Mass Customization

This chapter presents an exploratory study involving a group of athletic shoe enthusiasts and their feelings towards customized footwear. These "sneakerheads" demonstrate their infatuation with sneakers via activities ranging from creating catalogs of custom shoes to buying and selling rare athletic footwear online. The key characteristic these individuals share is that, for them, athletic shoes are a fundamental fashion accessory stepped in symbolism and meaning. A series of in-depth interviews utilizing the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) provide a better understanding of how issues such as art, self-expression, exclusivity, peer recognition, and counterfeit goods interact with the mass customization of symbolic products by category experts.

A Field Study of the Impact of a Performance-Based Incentive Plan

Much management accounting research focuses on design of incentive compensation contracts. A basic assumption in these contracts is that performance-based incentives improve employee performance. This paper reports on a field test of the multi-period incentive effects of a performance-based compensation plan on the sales of a retail establishment. Analysis of panel data for 15 retail outlets over 66 months indicates a sales increase when the plan is implemented, an effect that persists and increases over time. Sales gains are significantly lower in the peak selling season when more temporary workers are employed.

It’s Cheaper than Acquiring New Ones: Retaining Members to Your Service

The benefits of retention are well known: it’s cheaper and easier to retain existing customers than it is to try to acquire new ones. Secondly, retained customers play a vital role in the acquisition of new customers through word-of-mouth. Thirdly, retained customers have a higher monetary value, due to being more susceptible to cross-selling initiatives. So, retention is important. But, it’s difficult to achieve, especially for membership organisations. Numerous organisations work on a membership-based business model, such as health clubs, trade unions, charities and even professional associations. Often, recruiting and retaining members is fundamental to the success of these enterprises which rely on membership fees as their primary revenue stream.

Measuring, Modeling, and Forecasting Volatility and Correlations from High-Frequency Data

This dissertation contains four essays that all share a common purpose: developing new methodologies to exploit the potential of high-frequency data for the measurement, modeling and forecasting of financial assets volatility and correlations. The first two chapters provide useful tools for univariate applications while the last two chapters develop multivariate methodologies. In chapter 1, we introduce a new class of univariate volatility models named FloGARCH models. FloGARCH models provide a parsimonious joint model for low frequency returns and realized measures, and are sufficiently flexible to capture long memory as well as asymmetries related to leverage effects. We analyze the performances of the models in a realistic numerical study and on the basis of a data set composed of 65 equities. Using more than 10 years of high-frequency transactions, we document significant statistical gains related to the FloGARCH models in terms of in-sample fit, out-of-sample fit and forecasting accuracy compared to classical and Realized GARCH models. In chapter 2, using 12 years of high-frequency transactions for 55 U.S. stocks, we argue that combining low-frequency exogenous economic indicators with high-frequency financial data improves the ability of conditionally heteroskedastic models to forecast the volatility of returns, their full multi-step ahead conditional distribution and the multi-period Value-at-Risk. Using a refined version of the Realized LGARCH model allowing for time-varying intercept and implemented with realized kernels, we document that nominal corporate profits and term spreads have strong long-run predictive ability and generate accurate risk measures forecasts over long-horizon. The results are based on several loss functions and tests, including the Model Confidence Set. Chapter 3 is a joint work with David Veredas. We study the class of disentangled realized estimators for the integrated covariance matrix of Brownian semimartingales with finite activity jumps. These estimators separate correlations and volatilities. We analyze different combinations of quantile- and median-based realized volatilities, and four estimators of realized correlations with three synchronization schemes. Their finite sample properties are studied under four data generating processes, in presence, or not, of microstructure noise, and under synchronous and asynchronous trading. The main finding is that the pre-averaged version of disentangled estimators based on Gaussian ranks (for the correlations) and median deviations (for the volatilities) provide a precise, computationally efficient, and easy alternative to measure integrated covariances on the basis of noisy and asynchronous prices. Along these lines, a minimum variance portfolio application shows the superiority of this disentangled realized estimator in terms of numerous performance metrics. Chapter 4 is co-authored with Niels S. Hansen, Asger Lunde and Kasper V. Olesen, all affiliated with CREATES at Aarhus University. We propose to use the Realized Beta GARCH model to exploit the potential of high-frequency data in commodity markets. The model produces high quality forecasts of pairwise correlations between commodities which can be used to construct a composite covariance matrix. We evaluate the quality of this matrix in a portfolio context and compare it to models used in the industry. We demonstrate significant economic gains in a realistic setting including short selling constraints and transaction costs.

Fixation du prix de vente des exploitations agricoles québécoises: comparaison entre fermes laitières et autres types de production

L’écart croissant entre les valeurs marchande et économique des exploitations agricoles québécoises complexifie le processus de transfert des fermes à la prochaine génération. La capacité de payer limitée des repreneurs et les besoins de retraite des cédants restreignent la marge de manoeuvre nécessaire afin de déterminer un prix de vente de l’entreprise adéquat. La présente étude vise à analyser les déterminants du prix de vente des fermes et montre que dans notre échantillon, le prix est significativement corrélé avec les besoins de retraite nets des cédants et de façon moins significative, avec la valeur économique des fonds propres de l’entreprise. Les considérations financières semblent éclipser les aspects humains et d’importants compromis sont réalisés des deux côtés de la transaction en vue d’assurer la continuité de l’entreprise. L’influence d’intervenants externes à l’entreprise entre également en ligne de compte dans la fixation du prix, ce qui implique que la décision ne découle pas uniquement d’une négociation entre cédants et repreneurs. De façon générale, les fermes laitières semblent confrontées aux mêmes défis que les autres types de production quant à la fixation de leur prix de vente, ce qui suggère que la problématique soit davantage une question de gestion plutôt qu’une question spécifique au secteur. À moins d’un rétrécissement de l’écart entre la valeur marchande des actifs et leurs capacités à générer des revenus, la fixation du prix de vente de plusieurs fermes du Québec risque d’être encore plus contraignante à l’avenir.

IFRS 9 ‘Financial instruments’: Anticipated effects of the standard change at Kesko Group

IFRS 9 Financial instruments presents the classification and measurement, the impairment and the hedge accounting requirements for accounting of financial instruments. The standard was set by the International Accounting Standards Board to replace IAS 39 Financial instruments: Recognition and Measurement on 1 January 2018. Hence, the long-criticized and complexly experienced requirements for accounting of financial instruments will undergo the most significant reform. This thesis addresses anticipated effects of IFRS 9, focusing on the challenges the new classification and measurement requirements bring forth in the case organization Kesko. This thesis was conducted as an action research, in which, a case study method was applied. The thesis was conducted with a twofold manner, which involved general analysis of IFRS 9 and further covered distinct ambitions related to the case organization. For the general part, empirical data was gathered by interviewing two IFRS experts from KPMG and PwC, while the interviews within the case organization constituted for the case study. Further, the literature on the IFRS 9 was such scant that the theoretical examination was merged with the IFRS experts’ quotations that also strived to contribute to the overall objective of reinforcing the body of research related to the subject. This thesis indicates that IFRS 9 will most fundamentally reform the impairment and the hedge accounting requirements of financial instruments. Regard to impairment, the changes are anticipated to increase the amount of loan-loss provisions, whereas the relaxed hedge accounting requirements are expected to encourage more companies to commence the application of hedge accounting. The thesis provides empirical support on that the term business model for managing financial assets, introduced in IFRS 9, is ably hard to comprehend and remains ambiguous. It goes on to argue that the most prominent issue in defining the business model for managing financial assets is the limits set in IFRS 9 for selling financial assets. In consideration of Kesko, this thesis finds that the key effects of IFRS 9 are anticipated to be the reshaping of the organization’s treasury policy and further examination of the possibility to apply hedge accounting for foreign exchange derivatives. What is more, the thesis presumes that complying the requirements of IFRS 9 Kesko will apply the hold to collect and sell model for managing financial assets in future.

Do acesso clássico à comercialização: especificidades do mercado imobiliário informal na área especial de interesse social de Mãe Luiza, Natal/ RN.

This study presents research regarding affordable housing and their effects on the spatial reconfiguration of Natal/ RN, aiming to identify the specificities of the informality of urban land. This study aims to understand how informal housing market operates housing provision for the population located in popular informal settlements, through buying and selling market and rental market of residential properties irregular / illegal. This understanding will be through the neighborhood of Mãe Luisa, Special Area of Social Interest (SASI), located between neighborhoods with a population of high purchasing power and inserted into the tourist shaft of seaside of town. The characterization of informal housing market in Mãe Luiza, from buyers, sellers and renters, will help to understand how these informal transactions operate on SASI and housing provision for public policy development and implementation of housing programs and land regularization for low-income population, adequate to dynamic and reality of housing of informal areas

An investigation of the molecular pharmacology of G protein-coupled receptor 35

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are seven-pass integral membrane proteins that act as transducers of extracellular signals across the lipid bilayer. Their location and involvement in basic and pathological physiological processes has secured their role as key targets for pharmaceutical intervention. GPCRs are targeted by many of the best-selling drugs on the market and there are a substantial number of GPCRs that are yet to be characterised; these could offer interest for therapeutic targeting. GPR35 is one such receptor that, as a result of gene knockout and genome wide association studies, has attracted interest through its association with cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disease. Elucidation of the basic physiological function of GPR35 has, however, been difficult due a paucity of potent and selective ligands in addition to a lack of consensus on the endogenous ligand. Herein, a focussed drug discovery effort was carried out to identify agonists of GPR35. Various in vitro cellular assays were employed in conjunction with N- or C-terminally manipulated forms of the receptor to investigate GPR35’s signalling profile and to provide an assay format suitable for the characterisation of newly identified ligands. Although GPR35 associates with both Gαi/o and Gα13 families of small heterotrimeric G proteins, the G protein-independent β-arrestin-2 recruitment format was found to be the most suited to drug screening efforts. Small molecule compound screening, carried out in conjunction with the Medical Research Council Technology, identified compound 1 as the most potent ligand of human GPR35 reported at that time. However, the lower efficacy and potency of compound 1 at the rodent species orthologues of GPR35 prevented its use in in vivo studies. A subsequent effort, carried out with Novartis, focused on mast cell stabilisers as putative agonists of GPR35, revealed lodoxamide and bufrolin as highly potent agonists that activated human and rat GPR35 with equal potency. This finding offered–for the first time–the opportunity to employ the same GPR35 ligand between species at a similar concentration, an important factor to consider when translating rodent in vivo functional studies to those in man. Additionally, using molecular modelling and site directed mutagenesis studies, these newly identified compounds were used to aid characterisation of the ligand binding pockets of human and rat GPR35 to reveal the molecular basis of species selectivity at this receptor. In summary, this research effort presents GPR35 tool compounds that can now be used to dissect the basic biology of GPR35 and investigate its contribution to disease.