One of the primary concerns to market a product is to find appropriate channel to target customers. The recent advances on information technology have created new products with tremendous opportunities. This paper presents a mixed integer programming technique based on McCarthy & apos; s 4PS to locate suitable billboards for marketing newly introduced IPHONE product. The paper considers two types of information including age and income and tries to find the best places such that potential consumers aged 25-35 with high income visit the billboards and the cost of advertisement is minimized. The model is formulated in terms of mixed integer programming and it has been applied for potential customers who live in city of Tabriz, Iran. Using a typical software package, the model detects appropriate places in various parts of the city.

Brand plays essential role on the success of most organizations and it has been considered as organizational assets. Therefore, brand management is important in today’s structure of organizations. A good brand helps gain new customer and future preferences, which leads to customer retention. Brand loyalty is one of the most important components of brand management. It can raise firm’s market share and it has close relationship with firm’s return of investment and profits. This research tries to answer this question and finds out more about the relationship between customer satisfaction, trust, brand equity, brand image and customer loyalty. The study uses a sample of 384 regular customers who use insurance services in Iran. Using Pearson correlation ratio as well as structural equation modeling, the study has detected positive and meaningful relationship between brand equity and other factors such as customer satisfaction, trust, etc.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to predict future cash flows using present cash flow and accruals using the information of 96 selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2007-2011. The proposed study uses linear regression techniques to forecast future cash flow and the results indicate that cash flow and accruals together could provide more power to forecast cash flow. In addition, accrual provides future cash flow better than cash flow. The survey also performs an investigation on discretionary accrual and finds that the firms with higher accruals maintain lower return compared with firms with lower return. This means there is a clear evidence of discretionary accruals on Tehran Stock Exchange.

This article evaluates the relationship between institutional ownership and compositional performance indices in company life cycle among corporations accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange comparatively. In representation relations owner’s goal in maximum wealth; therefore, the goal controls the representative work and evaluates his performance. The statistical society in this research consists of corporations accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2006-2010. A cross-sectional regression of corporations is obtained and along with different stages of life cycle, their variance is analyzed. The results of this research indicate that:

1. In corporations’ growth stage, institutional ownership causes increasing assimilation performance and decreasing economic and financial performance.
2. In maturity stage, institutional ownership causes increasing assimilation performance but it has no effect on financial performance and it has a twofold effect on economic performance.
3. In decline stage, institutional ownership has a twofold effect on assimilation performance and it causes decreasing economic and financial performance.

One of the primary assumptions in accounting industries is to expect an increase (decrease) in cost of production is proportion to increase (decrease) in sales revenue. However, there are some evidences that the cost of production does not decrease with the same trend as revenue decreases. This phenomenon is called sticky behavior since the cost of production in not reduced as the sales decreases especially in operating as well as administration department. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study sticky behavior on 70 selected firms from Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2002-2011. The results indicate that sales and general administration cost (SGA) as well as the costs of sold goods strongly have sticky behaviors.

Electronic learning is getting popular in the world and more universities are offering various courses through internet. This paper presents an empirical investigation on effectiveness of electronic courses in one of Iranian universities whose students were enrolled on electronic learning. The proposed study designs a questionnaire to measure the effects of this program in terms of teaching, administration and electronic content, and distributes it among 354 randomly selected students. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.97, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The study gathers all inputs in Likert scale in terms of linguistic variables. The study uses ANFIS to measure to analyze the data and the results indicate that electronic learning itself maintains the highest popularity among students (0.618) followed by electronic content (0.569) and administration efforts (0.563).

During the past few years, there has been growing interest to use unified modeling language (UML) to consider the functional requirements. However, lacking a tool to detect the accuracy and the logic of diagrams in this language makes a formal model indispensable. In this study, conversion of primary UML model of a system to a colored Petri net has been accomplished in order to examine the precision of the model. For this purpose, first the definition of priority and implementation tags for UML activity diagram are provided; then it is turned into colored Petri net. Second, the proposed model provides translated tags in terms of net transitions and some monitors are used to control the system characteristics. Finally, an executable model of UML activity diagram is provided so that the designer could simulate the model by using the simulation results to detect and to refine the problems of the model. In addition, by checking the results, we find out the proposed method enhances authenticity and accuracy of early models and the ratio of system validation increases compared with previous methods.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to find the relationship between consumer’s behaviors towards well-known luxury brands in Iranian market. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 250 randomly people who purchase luxury products. The study investigates the effects of three variables including perception value, social normality and need for being exclusive on perception of a brand for motivating customers to purchase luxury products. In addition, the study tries to find out whether customers’ educational backgrounds influence on purchasing luxury products or not. Cronbach alphas are all well above the minimum acceptable level, which validates the survey. Using structural equation modeling, the study confirms all hypotheses of the survey.

During the past two decades, there have been growing interests on developing websites to build a link between various groups of people to share their knowledge such as Google service. This kind of activity helps fast and reliable distribution of knowledge since someone disseminates a question and various people attempt to provide some responses. This paper presents a system dynamic method for investigating the relationships between various components of a benchmark site. The proposed study develops closed loop dynamic among various components of the survey and provides some necessary actions for development of such systems. The results of our survey have indicated that the new forum could end up having significant number of unanswered questions. Therefore, researchers who work for this forum are suggested to increase their skills and their response rates to reduce the rate of unanswered questions.