This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of sales related factors on brand equity. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all 353 sales representatives who work for a dairy producer in province of Mazandaran, Iran. Using principal component analysis, seven variables including qualification criteria, motivation, personality, empowering sales representative, information size, personal characteristics and sales interest in job on brand equity are extracted. The implementation of structural equation modeling has confirmed that there were positive and meaningful relationships between seven factors and brand equity. The highest impact belongs to empowering sales representative followed by qualification criteria, quantity of information, personality and sales motivation.

Nowadays, the electronic insurance (EI) is one the electronic services, which is used in most countries, and that is one effective factor in developing the exporting products and services. On the other hand, the incurrence industry and very especially EI represent their importance both domestically and internationally. One of the ways for transferring the exporting risks is to transfer the risks to the insurer. This paper examines the characteristics of EI and the effects of decreasing the exporting risk charges. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in the form of Likert scale, the validity of the questionnaire is validated by some the experts & apos; viewpoints and the Cronbach & apos; alpha is measure as 0.794. The results of applying Freedman test have disclosed that facilitating export activities was the most important factor followed by access to target export market information.

Society welfare plays essential role on supporting poor and low income deciles governments normally pay subsidies on different goods to decrease the prices and as a result, increase purchasing power. However, due to lack of a good target, the relatively rich and high income deciles benefit more than the poor from subsidies do. Therefore, it seems necessary to design self-targeted safety-net programs and targeted subsidies. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the welfare consequences of self-targeted subsidies. In other words, this study tries to find out whether or not transferring one unit of subsidies paid on the subsidized goods mostly used by the rich to the nonsubsidized goods mostly used by the poor improves social welfare. For this purpose, using Atkinson social welfare function, we calculated the change in social welfare caused by self-targeted subsidies. The results show that self-targeted subsidies increase social welfare. The extent of this increase is negatively related to inequality aversion parameter, while positively related to the share of nonsubsidized goods in low income deciles budget.

Measuring the relative efficiency of employee plays essential role on the success of any organization including universities. In this paper, we present a survey to detect and to prioritize important factors influencing on the productivity of employees who work for one of Iranian universities located in city of Tehran, Iran. The study also uses analytical network process to prioritize the factors. Based on the results of our survey, we have categorized effective productivity factors into three groups of research, educational and administration groups. In our survey, coherence and unity with no dispersion of the employee & apos; s duties, systematic job rotation and correct design communication job are among the most important factors influencing on employees’ productivity.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of information management (IT) on senior IT executives. The population of the survey includes all senior IT executives who work for different banks in Iran. The study adopts a questionnaire developed by Chen and Wu (2011) [Chen, Y. C., & Wu, J. H. (2011). IT management capability and its impact on the performance of a CIO. Information & Management, 48(4), 145-156.]. The study investigates whether CIOs’ superior IT competency and CIO & apos; s superior management are positively associated with IT management activity effectiveness. In addition, the study investigates whether a higher level of IT management activity effectiveness is positively associated with CIO role performance. Using structural equation modeling, the study has confirmed three hypotheses of the survey.

Quality has always been one of the most important topics in the competitiveness of organizations’ service activities and it influences on brands, significantly. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of service quality on brand personality in hotel industry. The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring brand personality by using Aaker’s questionnaire (Aaker, 1997) [Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research, 34(3), 347-356.] and the other one for measuring service quality. The study chooses a hotel chain in city of Mashad, Iran named Sadr Hotel and examines the effects of five-brand personality on service quality by choosing a sample of 384 customers. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined that all five factors could influence on service quality of the case study, positively.

Performance measurement in managerial accounting is normally associated with cash flow and it is executed based on different figures such as testing information content abuse and accounting figures. However, increasing the information content in accrual components of earning and internal performance measurement provides additional informative insights. This paper studies the relationship between operating cash flows and earnings along with total shareholder returns. The study chooses the information of 54 firms from Tehran Stock Exchange. The results show that there were some meaningful relationship between the operating cash flow, profitability and the returns of all stakeholders. However, this happens by increasing profitability and cash flow of information asymmetry proportion to their correlation with the economic efficiency of shareholders’ returns.

Brand loyalty is one of the most important concepts in brand literature. Customer’s loyalty toward brand can increase firm’s share price. In addition, firms’ market share maintains close relationship with net profit and capital used return. Company efforts to motivate customers to switch from competitive brands to their own or to induce them to repurchase their own brands are very important in their marketing activities. Therefore, investigating customer variety-seeking orientation and level of involvement in decision-making plays essential role in explaining customers’ product selection activities. This study intends to examine interrelationships among customer satisfaction, loyalty, and switching intent in industrial food suppliers and verifies the moderating effect of customer variety-seeking orientation and purchase decision involvement. The findings indicate that, the impact of purchase involvement was lower than variety seeking and the satisfaction had the highest negative impact on switching intent of customers.

This paper presents a social work study to investigate the effects of employees’ income and age on their mental health. The study has accomplished among a sample of 150 randomly selected employees who worked for Esfahan steel company located in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study uses a standard questionnaire, which is adopted from Goldberg and Williams (2000) [Goldberg, D., & Williams, P. (2000). General health questionnaire (GHQ). Swindon, Wiltshire, UK: NFER Nelson.]. The results of the implementation of ANOVA test have revealed that while there was a significant and positive relationship between employees’ salary and mental health, there was not any meaningful relationship between employees’ age and mental health.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to identify important factors influencing integrated marketing planning using information technology. The proposed study designs a questionnaire for measuring integrated marketing planning, which consists of three categories of structural factors, behavioral factors and background factors. There are 40 questions associated with the proposed study in Likert scale. Cronbach alphas have been calculated for structural factors, behavioral factors and background factors as 0.89, 0.86 and 0.83, respectively. Using some statistical test, the study has confirmed the effects of three factors on integrated marketing. In addition, the implementation of Freedman test has revealed that structural factors were the most important factor followed by background factors and behavioral factors.