Brand loyalty is one of the most important factors influencing on the success of retail stores. Many retail stores in the field of sport shoes in city of Tehran, Iran are facing tight competition and there seems to be that only stores with loyal customers could survive. In this paper, we present an exploration study to find out important factors influencing retail stores selling one of well-known sport shows such as Adidas, Nike, etc. in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes among 265 regular customers of these stores and analyze them using factor analysis. The results indicate that there were four important factors influencing customer loyalty including brand identification, brand promotion, brand loyalty and characterization of stores.

This study investigates the explanatory power of leverage and cash flows in future cash flow prediction in Tehran Stock Exchange by considering Signaling Theory and Pecking Order Theory. Based on theoretical foundations, the regression models of leverage and cash flow with a set of control variables was developed. Statistical samples consist of companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2005- 2011. The results show that there was a negative relationship between cash flow and leverage levels in contemporary time. This is consistent with pecking order behavior. While at intertemporer level, there was a positive relationship between current leverage and the firm & apos; s cash flows in the future. This is consistent with signaling theory.

A very challenging issue in robot navigation or path planning in an unknown environment is to find a globally optimal path from the start to the target point at the same time avoid collisions. This paper presents a new sensor-based online method for generating collision-free optimal path for mobile robots to take a target amidst static obstacles. It is assumed that, target is static and the location of obstacles is completely unknown for robot and all of these materials will be calculated online. Although the area that is under vision of robot’s sensor is confined, we have to consider an inevitable assumption that target is detectable by robot in everywhere. Proposed algorithm to avoid colliding the obstacles in its way toward target, detects a short and feasible paths by utilizing an innovative and effective method. Following that, shortest of them to will be chosen for navigation. There are different important factors which are considered in robot motion planning problems. First, required time for robot’s action in unpredicted circumstances that the running time of the used algorithm plays a major role in this term. Second, the length of traveled path from start point to target point that represents the efficiency of exploited algorithm for leading the robot. The presented algorithm of this paper has proved its efficiency in both of mentioned issues. Simulation results show that traveled path has the least length and the running time is remarkably less than other presented algorithms until now. In addition, the effectiveness of presented algorithm in complex situation is discernible. These results prove that the presented novel and effective robot navigation algorithm is very suitable for real-time navigation in complex environments.

During the past few years, there have been growing interests among researchers to study the effect of block share ownership on corporate earning especially in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of block ownership on performance of firms in terms of profitability. The proposed study develops two econometric models and applies them on selected firms from Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2002-2010. The primary objective of this survey is to find the relationship between return of assets and Tobin & apos; s Q as dependent variables with eight independent variables including company size, sales growth, block ownership, debt and liability ratios, etc. The results of implementation of ordinary least squares on two econometric models reveal that while there is no meaningful relationship between return of asset and block ownership there is a meaningful relationship between block ownership and Tobin & apos; s Q.

This research aims to investigate the extent of social and environmental disclosure (SED) in corporate annual reports. Specifically, This is an exploratory study designed to examine the relationship between corporate social and environmental disclosure (CSED) and corporate attributes and firm-specific factors in a developing country, Iran. In order to do this, we use content analysis approach with sentence count for the level of disclosure measurement by looking into the annual reports of the 66 listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. The Panel analysis and econometric software EVIEWS 6 are used for analyzing data. The Results show that there is significant positive relationship between company size and level of CSED also there is significant negative relationship between environment sensitive industries and level of CSED. However, we did not find any relationship between profitability and the level of CSED.

This study investigates organizational structure, culture, and information technology as knowledge management (KM) infrastructural capabilities, and compares their significance and status quo in five medical research centers in Tehran, Iran. Objectives of this research were pursued by employing two statistical methods, regression analysis and Friedman test. Included in the study were 135 people (researchers and support staff) from five medical and healthcare research centers of Tehran. A survey questionnaire including 23 questions was utilized to examine organizational structure, culture and information technology indicators. And another 12 questions examined KM effectiveness. The Friedman test indicated that in terms of their status quo, the three studied KM enablers are at different conditions, with organizational culture having the best (mean rank=1.79) and IT the worst (mean rank=2.14) status. Moreover, it was revealed by regression analysis that organizational structure is believed to have the most significant impact (Beta= 0.397) on the effectiveness of knowledge management initiatives, while information technology gained the least perceived impact (Beta= 0.176).

During the past few years, there has been growing interests in reducing cost of products and services among developing countries. Privatization is believed to be one of the most important techniques to increase relative efficiencies of publically held organizations. In this paper, we study important barriers on privatization of television (TV) media industry in Iran. The proposed study of this paper designs and distributes a questionnaire using a sample of 234 out of 600 graduate students who were enrolled in media communication studies and examined six hypotheses based on one-side t-student. The survey considers different factors influencing privatization of TV media industry. The results of the investigation indicate that the cost of TV production, short and long-term investment security, people & apos; s interest on investing on TV media industry, building appropriate culture, cultural obstacles and economic barriers influence media privatization, significantly.

During the past few years, there have been growing interests on intellectual capital due to industrial changes on the market. Thus, identifying different ways to create, manage, and evaluate the impact of intellectual capital has remained an open area of research. One of the most important organizational capabilities, which could help organizations create and share knowledge is to effectively use knowledge to create competitive advantage. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the effects of intellectual capital on other components and their impacts on organizational learning capability. The statistical population includes 500 employees of an Iranian organization. The study uses a sample size including 273 people using Morgan statistical table and Cronbach & apos; s alpha is calculated as 0.838. The results of this survey indicate that human capital, relational capital and learning capabilities have positive impact on organizational performance. In addition, relational capital positively impacts learning capability and human capital influences positively on relational capital.

The intricacies of economic activities and growing increase in competition have made commercial units with the duty of production and financial data processing, orienting themselves with production cycle. This is considered as the heart of organization such that they could be more effective in decision-making. The method adopted in this research is descriptive – survey and it attempts to attain the objectives the researchers based on four independent variables including Production design, Programming, production operations and cost accounting. To test the hypotheses, the study adopts one sample T test method and to investigate uniformity of effects of each variable, Kruscal-Wallis test is employed. The results obtained from the tests indicate that AISs are not compatible with production cycle, where, in turn, has led to rejection of modern costing systems such as activity based costing (ABC).

Building strong commitment among organizational employees plays an important role in reducing delays and displacement. It can also increase employee efficiency, employees & apos; mental freshness and manifesting both organizational admirable targets and personal goals. The purpose of this study is to detect and to forecast the impact of organizational climate on level of organizational commitment among staff education in city of Kermanshah located in west part Iran. The survey designs questionnaires and collects necessary information using a descriptive survey. The statistical population includes all 921 employees who were either enrolled in administration level or work as teacher in all areas of city of Kermanshah. The study selects 300 individuals from the statistical population randomly. The proposed model of this paper uses factor analysis to determine the most important factors influencing organizational commitment and Cronbach alpha is used to validate the results. The results show that there is a significant relationship between the components of role and paying enough attention to goals, the variable organizational climate, and the whole variable dimensions of organizational commitment. The other observation is that there was a weak relationship with some components of social commitment, and there was not any significant relationship with other aspects. Results of multivariate regression analysis shows that there was a high correlation between organizational climate and social commitment (t-student=6.208).