Strategic positioning has always been a key tool for managers to analyze the position of the firm in different attributes in comparison with competitors. With regard to fierce competition in banking industry, the aim of this study is to analyze the position of Bank Melli Iran with 5 public and private rivals in 6 attributes. The sample of this study was 387 Bank Melli Iran customers. The results of this study were in 14 perceptual maps in which the positions of Bank Melli Iran attributes have been shown compared with bank’s key competitors. The results showed that Bank Melli Iran had strong position and came to the first place in attributes like price, physical equipment and location and security. Moreover, Bank Melli Iran has to improve its position in attributes with no better position.

This paper studies the work life quality and social capital on the organizational commitment. The primary objective of this research is to identify the effect of the quality of Work Life and social capital on the organizational commitment. The study has accomplished among 240 out of 900 employees of tax affairs organization in Lorestan province. To achieve our goal, nine hypotheses were examined. There are three questionnaires including the quality of work life, social capital, and the organizational commitment. Using structural equation modeling, the study has confirmed that there was a meaningful relationship between the variables of the quality of work life with social capital and organizational commitment; namely affective, continuous, normative. In addition, there is a meaningful relationship between the variable social capital with organizational commitment including affective, continuous, and normative.

Regarding to the role of tax in the economy as the most stable and constant source of income and also due to the fact that there was no success in achieving fiscal goals by the government during its economic and developmental programs, paying attention to and making effort in this domain is regarded as a necessity in any country. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of enforcing Article 181 of Direct Tax Law on extent of taxpayers’ satisfaction, increase of trust, increase of tax compliance or decrease of tax evasion in Isfahan, Iran. The present study consists of a main hypothesis and four sub-hypotheses. Data were collected from 100 companies regarding their performance during 200 years. Article 181 of Direct Tax Code was implemented upon these companies over the period 2006-2011. Hypotheses of the study were evaluated. The results of the study, in survey and post-event pivot, showed that enforcing Article 181 of Direct Tax Law in Isfahan was effective. However, its effect was not significant regarding increase of taxpayers’ familiarity and acquaintance with Tax Office and its functions in Isfahan; it increased tax compliance, decreased tax evasion by the taxpayers, increased taxpayers’ satisfaction and helped them trust on Tax Office and its performance.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of multimedia advertisement on building brand equity. The proposed study uses two questionnaires, one for multimedia advertisement, which consists of 17 questions and the other one for measuring brand equity. The survey is applied among 384 randomly selected customers who do their daily businesses with banks located in province of Kordestan, Iran. Using Pearson correlation as well as linear regression techniques, the study has determined a positive and meaningful relationship between these two variables. In our survey, word of mouth advertisement seems to have the highest impact on brand equity followed by having seminars.

Measuring different risk factors such as credit risk in banking industry has been an interesting area of studies. The artificial neural network is a nonparametric method developed to succeed for measuring credit risk and this method is applied to measure the credit risk. This research’s neural network follows back propagation paradigm, which enables it to use historical data for predicting future values with very good out of sample fitting. Macroeconomic variables including GDP, exchange rate, inflation rate, stock price index, and M2 are used to forecast credit risk for two Iranian banks; namely Saderat and Sarmayeh over the period 2007-2011. Research data are being tested for ADF and Causality Granger tests before entering the ANN to achieve the best lag structure for the research model. MSE and R values for the developed ANN in this research respectively are 86×?10?^(-4) and 0.9885, respectively. The results showed that ANN was able to predict banks’ credit risk with low error. Sensibility analyses which has accomplished on this research’s ANN corroborates that M2 has the highest effect on the ANN’s credit risk and should be considered as an additional leading indicator by Iran’s banking authorities. These matters confirm validation of macroeconomic notions in Iran’s credit systematic risk.

Measuring different risk factors such as credit risk in banking industry has been an interesting area of studies. The artificial neural network is a nonparametric method developed to succeed for measuring credit risk and this method is applied to measure the credit risk. This research’s neural network follows back propagation paradigm, which enables it to use historical data for predicting future values with very good out of sample fitting. Macroeconomic variables including GDP, exchange rate, inflation rate, stock price index, and M2 are used to forecast credit risk for two Iranian banks; namely Saderat and Sarmayeh over the period 2007-2011. Research data are being tested for ADF and Causality Granger tests before entering the ANN to achieve the best lag structure for the research model. MSE and R values for the developed ANN in this research respectively are 86×?10?^(-4) and 0.9885, respectively. The results showed that ANN was able to predict banks’ credit risk with low error. Sensibility analyses which has accomplished on this research’s ANN corroborates that M2 has the highest effect on the ANN’s credit risk and should be considered as an additional leading indicator by Iran’s banking authorities. These matters confirm validation of macroeconomic notions in Iran’s credit systematic risk.

There is an increasing need for enterprise architecture in numerous organizations with complicated systems with various processes. Support for information technology, organizational units whose elements maintain complex relationships increases. Enterprise architecture is so effective that its non-use in organizations is regarded as their institutional inability in efficient information technology management. The enterprise architecture process generally consists of three phases including strategic programing of information technology, enterprise architecture programing and enterprise architecture implementation. Each phase must be implemented sequentially and one single flaw in each phase may result in a flaw in the whole architecture and, consequently, in extra costs and time. If a model is mapped for the issue and then it is evaluated before enterprise architecture implementation in the second phase, the possible flaws in implementation process are prevented. In this study, the processes of enterprise architecture are illustrated through UML diagrams, and the architecture is evaluated in programming phase through transforming the UML diagrams to Petri nets. The results indicate that the high costs of the implementation phase will be reduced.

Human resources are the primary factor for development of competitiveness and innovation and reaching competitive advantage and they try to improve corporate capabilities through various characteristics such as value creation, scarcity and difficulty of imitation. This paper investigates the effect of human resource flexibility and its dimensions on human resource development and its dimensions. The survey was conducted using descriptive-correlation method that intended to describe how human resource flexibility was effective on human resource development. Questionnaire was tool of data collection. The statistical population included one hundred employees of the Electric Company in Ilam province, thus census method was used. Reliability of the questionnaire was measured via Cronbach & apos; s alpha equal to 0.96. The findings revealed that flexibility and its dimensions were effective on human resource development and dimensions of it. As a result, human resource flexibility should be considered for development of human resources and employees with the highest flexibility should be selected.

This paper evaluates the impacts of earnings quality criteria on the ratio of price to earnings per share (P/E) on 88 accepted companies in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) over the period 2007- 2012. The results indicate that there was a positive and significant relationship between the P/E ratio and cash dividend. There is also a positive and significant relationship between P/E ratio as dependent variable and the gross profit ratio to sales. On the other hand, there is a significant reverse relationship between P/E ratio and the profit variability. However, no significant relationship exists between P/E as dependent variable and deferrals (accruals) variable.