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.

As there is still only limited research on students brand choice of mobile phones, the focus of this study was to ascertain drivers of tertiary students’ mobile phone brand choice in Ghana. Using a structured questionnaire, data was collected from a random sample of 840 students from three tertiary institutions in Ghana. The study revealed that the most significant determinant of the students brand choice of mobile phones was perceived quality (p & LT; 0.05). Although price, prestige, and promotion also influenced their choice of mobile phone these were not significant at the 0.05 level. The study further revealed that availability and mobile phones as gift items also influenced the brand of phone used by the students (p & GT; 0.05). The study concludes that in spite of their economic handicaps, students brand choice was driven most by perceived quality and not price. Recommendations on how information technology manufacturers’ particularly mobile phone companies and marketers can exploit these drivers to sustain and improve their brand equity among students have been made.

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.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the impact of brand value, service quality, customer trust and internet knowledge on customer retention. The study adoptes a questionnaire originally developed by Jurisic and Azevedo (2011) [Jurisic, B., & Azevedo, A. (2011). Building customer–brand relationships in the mobile communications market: The role of brand tribalism and brand reputation. Journal of Brand Management, 18(4), 349-366.] and distributes it among some people who purchased LED television from a well-known Korean manufacturer in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined positive effects of brand value (B = 0.377, Sig. = 0.0001), service quality (B = 0.204, Sig. = 0.0001) and internet knowledge (B = 0.280, Sig. = 0.0001). However, the study does not find any statistical evidence to confirm the effects of customer trust on customer retention.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of some corporate governance mechanisms on information asymmetry. From among different mechanisms of corporate governance, the number of board members who were not responsible, ownership concentration and the percentage of institutional ownership are considered. Time scale of the study includes the years from 2005 to 2011. Sampling was performed among all the companies accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange using systematic removal method. This sample includes 504 companies-years. This is a post-event study. Experimentally, this study lies in accounting proving research areas and it is based on financial statements of the firms, and regarding purpose is application. Descriptive method has been used in this study. The findings show that there was a positive and significant relationship between the number of board members who are not responsible and the percentage of institutional ownership from the one side, and information asymmetry from the other. In addition, the findings show a negative significant relationship between ownership concentration and information asymmetry.