Supply chain is one of the most important parts of industrial and economic problems. Measuring relative performance of supply chain is often tedious task since there is a need to deal with the multiple performance measures associated with members of supply chain, which integrate and coordinate the performance overall production system. Traditional approaches for measuring relative efficiency of supply chain cannot be applied directly for evaluating the relative efficiency of supply chains. This is because some measures linked to supply chain members cannot be simply classified as “outputs” or “inputs” of the supply chain. We present different models, which directly evaluate the performance of the supply chain as well as its members, while considering the relationship among the members. The modeling processes are based on the concept of non-cooperative and cooperative games. In this paper, we propose network data envelopment analysis for measuring relative performance of supply chain, which considers the system by distinct processes or stages, each one with its own inputs and outputs and with intermediate flows among the stages. The proposed method reduces computations to determine the relative efficiency of overall supply chain and efficiency of each the supply chain members.

Agricultural business is a very high-risk job and an increase demand for agricultural products from one side and steady increase in production cost and weather changes, on the other side, have motivated many to use insurance for agricultural products. Insurance plays an important role in influencing crop production and insured satisfaction or farmers. The purpose of this research is to find critical components in agricultural insurance. Based on an exploration of the literature review and interviews, the proposed study of this paper extracts 24 variables and using factor analysis, we select the most important factors, which are grouped in seven categories. The implementation of our factor analysis has revealed uncertainty, moderator, market equilibrium, risky environment, empowering factor, education, training, structural hazards and natural ecosystems as the most important factors influencing agricultural industry.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between workaholism and personality traits among managers. A questionnaire consists of 141 items is developed with standard measures and 145 questionnaires are distributed among the managers and 113 ones are gathered where final response rate is 78% after removing two useless questionnaires. Cranach & apos; s alphas is reported greater than 0.70, which shows the reliability of the subscales of the questionnaire. To test the hypotheses, different statistical techniques including one sample t test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and correlation are implemented. Findings of the study show that demographical variables do not affect workaholism among managers in public organizations. In addition, among the personality variables, a significant relationship is detected between introversion and dominance with workaholism.

There are many cases, where we may wish to choose a good accounting system and would like to learn how they work and the advantages and disadvantages of each so we can choose the better one for a business. In this paper, we present an empirical survey to understand whether we can choose accrual or cash accounting system. The proposed study designs a questionnaire among 220 experts in area of accounting affairs. The survey considers four sub hypotheses and one main hypothesis to see whether there are reliable rules and regulations in accrual-based accounting compared with cash accounting or not. Similarly, the survey investigates whether accrual-based accounting is more informative, comprehensive and provides better comparative results compared with cash accounting. The results indicate that accrual-based account performs better in terms of all mentioned criteria and it is a better method for managing accounting affairs compared with cash accounting systems.

As one of the new producing approaches, lean production has brought in new opportunities for producers all around the world. Many producers have adopted the technique for surviving the growing world market. By combining competitive advantages, lean attributes, and lean enablers as three factors, the present study attempts to determine the most suitable enablers for improvement of lean attributes in a case study. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in fuzzy environment and House of Quality (HOQ) matrix, successfully employed for development of new products, are adopted as approach of the study. Weights of competitive advantages, lean attributes and enablers are calculated through fuzzy analysis hierarchy process (FAHP), while fuzzy logarithmic least square method (LLSM) is used in calculation of the weights. Throughout the methodology, fuzzy logic is the basis for translating linguistic judgments required for the relationships and correlation matrix to numerical values. Moreover, final ranking of lean enablers is represented through area ranking method and taking into account various techniques of decision makers’ risk. Finally, a case study in automotive industry is introduced to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed methodology.

Quality of services in airline industry plays an important role in market penetration and customer retention. In this paper, we present a factor analysis to find important factors in Iranian Airline industry. The study designs a questionnaire consist of 35 questions and distribute it among 200 customers who regularly use services from 16 different airlines and they are investigated based on the implementation of factor analysis. The results of our survey determines seven important factors including physical features of the environment, Kettering, Pre-flight passenger services, Ability to respond, Reliability, Passenger service flight and Virtual Passenger Services. The paper discusses that improving these seven factors can significantly improve service quality in this sector.

The present paper aims to analyze, model and optimize regional development of rural and urban areas of Sistan & Balochestan, separately. The relationship between employment changes and growth rate of economic sections has been modeled and numbers of jobs required for providing optimum growth rate have been obtained. This paper indicates that considering the average census of five decades (1956-2006) the situation of labor market and growth rate of economic sections in urban areas are bad and worse in rural areas so that there is need to increase employment considerably in order to achieve minimum economic growth rate ( 1% growth).

Quality of life plays an important role on people's life style and there are many studies to determine important factors influencing it. In this paper, we study the effect of different factors influencing respect for women including upbringing children, strengthening families, participation and community involvement, women's talent political participation increase, women's confidence in accepting responsibility and consent of the docility of marriage. The proposed study of this paper selects a sample from all female students who are enrolled in educational studies in Shiraz university, Iran and using Pearson correlation test, we measure the relationship between seven mentioned items with respect for women. The results indicate that except one case, participation and community involvement, all other factors significantly increase respect for women.

Today, the positive impact of entrepreneurship in the economy has been globally accepted. Entrepreneurs could provide efficient techniques to face with upcoming economic challenges. In this paper, we first investigate the effect of entrepreneurship on growth of economy over the period 2005- 2011. Then we study the impact of four factors including Gross domestic product per worker, Growth in capital per worker, New firm creation and Technological innovation intensity on economic growth. The proposed model of this paper uses ordinary least square technique to investigate the relationship between four independent variables and economic growth. The results show that gross domestic product per worker is the only variable, which is statistically meaningful when the level of significance is five percent and the impact of other three variables including growth in capital per worker, new firm creation and technological innovation intensity are not statistically meaningful. In other word, as we see a 1% increase in gross domestic product per worker we could expect 8.712% increase in economic growth.

Measuring the relative performance of insurance firms plays an important role in this industry. In this paper, we present a two-stage data envelopment analysis to measure the performance of insurance firms, which were active over the period of 2006-2010. The proposed study of this paper performs DEA method in two stages where the first stage considers five inputs and three outputs while the second stage considers the outputs of the first stage as the inputs of the second stage and uses three different outputs for this stage. The results of our survey have indicated that while there were 4 efficient insurance firms most other insurances were noticeably inefficient. This means market was monopolized mostly by a limited number of insurance firms and competition was not fare enough to let other firms participate in economy, more efficiently.