This paper proposes an application of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to help decision maker evaluate different processes to identify the weaknesses of an automobile car service where the best alternatives and critical success factors are identified to improve their performances against the market leader. The proposed benchmarking process may help provide effective systematic decision support tool. Thus the endeavor has been made for car service industry to exhibit proposed framework by applying AHP to enhance its competitiveness. The proposed study provides an opportunity to apply to other industries in addition with a diminutive alteration.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine the key criteria that viral marketing practitioners believe should be implemented to measure about the success of viral marketing campaigns in insurance industry. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale where the effects of four independent variables, personal, message, media and tools characteristics are measured on an Iranian insurance firm’s reputation as well as service expansion. Cronbach alphas were measured for all components of the survey and they were all well above the minimum acceptable level. Using regression analysis, the study has determined positive and meaningful relationships between insurance firm’s reputation as well as service expansion and four independent variables.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine factors influencing on loan repayment in one of Iranian banks named Sepah Bank over the period 2012-2013. The study selects a sample of 290 bank’s customers who received loans and, using logistic regression technique, tries to find whether or not qualitative as well as quantitative characteristics of loan receivers influence on repayment of loans. The results indicate that history of outstanding debt as well as customers’ past experiences with banks had meaningful relationships with having bad credit and non-payment of loans. In our survey, having a bad credit in the past had positive relationship with non-payment of loans but long-term customers had negative relationship with non-payment of loans. In addition, working capital turnover ratio, cash ratio, total liabilities, current assets and loan value had significant impact on non-repayment of the loan facilities.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between product market competition and voluntary disclosure among 124 selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2004-2013. The study uses Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) and Lerner (LLIA) index to measure competition in terms of capacity and price, respectively. In addition, the study uses the questionnaire developed by Botosan (1997) [Botosan, C. A. (1997). Disclosure level and the cost of equity capital. Accounting Review, 72(3), 323-349.] to measure voluntary disclosure. Using linear regression technique, the study has determined that there was a meaningful, direct and positive relationship between voluntary disclosure and competition in terms of price (LLIA). In addition, the results indicate that there was a meaningful and reverse relationship between voluntary disclosure and competition in terms of capacity (HHI).

This study explains the components of ethical behavior and their impacts on life insurance companies in province of Mazandaran, Iran. There were 367 insurance representatives and the study selects a sample of 187 ones based on Cochran formula and 2 questionnaires were distributed among them. The first questionnaire, unethical behavior, includes 8 items including Bribery, Cheating, Deception, Interact with colleagues, Act as social behavior, Uncommitted to firm and Irresponsibility. In addition, the questionnaire of brand equity contains three components of Awareness, Perceived quality and Loyalty. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined that the effects of cheating and deception on unethical behaviors were not confirmed but the effects of other factors, bribery, interact with colleagues, act as social behavior, uncommitted to firm and irresponsibility on unethical behavior were confirmed. In addition, three components of Awareness, Perceived quality and Loyalty had positive relationship with brand equity.

This paper studies the relationship between principals’ reward power and their conflict management styles. The five conflict management styles that we use in this study are based on Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and include accommodating, avoiding, collaborating, competing, and compromising styles. This study can be classified as a regression analysis and is a descriptive study. Our statistical society for this research included all principals of high schools located in the city of Birjand. The results indicated that there was a significant relationship between principal’s reward power and accommodating conflict management style. The results also revealed that there was no significant relationship between principals’ reward power and the other four conflict management styles.

This paper aims to provide proper policies for inventory under uncertain conditions by comparing different inventory policies. To review the efficiency of these algorithms it is necessary to specify the area in which each of them is applied. Therefore, each of the models has been reviewed under different forms of retailing and they are ranked in terms of their expenses. According to the high values of inventories and their impacts on the costs of the companies, the ranking of various models using the simulation annealing algorithm are presented, which indicates that the proposed model of this paper could perform better than other alternative ones. The results also indicate that the suggested algorithm could save from 4 to 29 percent on costs of inventories.

The single machine scheduling problem aims at obtaining the best sequence for a set of jobs in a manufacturing system with a single machine. In this paper, we optimize rewards in single machine scheduling in rewards-driven systems such that total reward is maximized while the constraints contains of limitation in total rewards for earliness and learning, independent of earliness and learning and etc. are satisfied. In mentioned systems as for earliness and learning the bonus is awarded to operators, we consider only rewards in mentioned systems and it will not be penalized under any circumstances. Our objective is to optimize total rewards in mentioned system by taking the rewards in the form of quadratic for both learning and earliness. The recently-developed sequential quadratic programming (SQP), is used by solve the problem. Results show that SQP had satisfactory performance in terms of optimum solutions, number of iterations, infeasibility and optimality error. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the change rate of the objective function obtained based on the change rate of the “amount of earliness for jobs (Ei parameter)”.

In this paper an attempt is made to analyze the components of localization strategy including attribute policy, benefits policy, application/implementation policy, consumer policy, competition policy, quality/price policy and product category policy on development of brand equity. The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring bran equity, which is adopted from Buil et al. (2013) [Buil, I., de Chernatony, L., & Mart?nez, E. (2013). Examining the role of advertising and sales promotions in brand equity creation. Journal of Business Research, 66(1), 115-122.], and the other for measuring localization strategy designed by researchers. Cronbach alphas for brand equity and localization strategy are 0.82 and 0.78, respectively. The study is applied among consumers of products with a name of Samsung in city of Tehran, Iran. Using Pearson correlation as well as multiple regression technique, the study has determined that attribute, consumer and application/implementation policies influenced positively on brand equity.

Recommender systems help users faced with the problem of information overflow and provide personalized recommendations. Social networks are used for providing variety of business or social activities, or sometimes a combination of both. In this paper, by considering social network of users and according to users’ context and items, a new method is introduced that is based on trust and context aware for recommender systems in social networks. The purpose of this paper is to create a recommender system which increases precision of predicted ratings for all users especially for cold start users. In the proposed method, walking on web of trust is done by neighbor users for finding rating of similar items and users’ preference is gotten of items’ context. The results show that suitable recommendation with user’s context is provided by using this method. Also, this system can increase precision of predicted rating for all users and cold starts too and however, do not decrease the rating’s coverage.