Nowadays with the growth of organizations and their affiliates, the importance of information systems has increased. Functional and non-functional requirements of information systems in an organization are supported. There are literally several techniques to support the functional requirements in terms of software methodologies, but support for the second set of requirements has received little attention. Software Performance Engineering (SPE) forum tries to address this issue by presenting software methodologies to support both types of requirements. In this paper, we present a formal model for the evaluation of system performance based on a pragmatic model. Because of supporting the concurrency concepts, petri net has a higher priority than queuing system. For mapping UML to colored Petri net diagram, we use an intermediate graph. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed model may save significant amount of computations.

This paper examines the effects of big Five factors including openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism on creativity and innovation among selected employees of municipality in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study uses a standard questionnaire developed by Costa and McCrae (1980) [Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980). Influence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(4), 668.] to measure the effects of five personality characteristics. In addition, the study has adopted a questionnaire developed by Torrents et al. (2010) [Torrents, C., Castaner, M., DINU?OV?, M., & Anguera, M. T. (2010). Discovering new ways of moving: Observational analysis of motor creativity while dancing contact improvisation and the influence of the partner. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 44(1), 53-69.] for measuring creativity. Using a simple regression analysis, the study has detected negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism and creativity and innovation (B = -0.229, t-value = -3.196), a positive and meaningful relationship between extraversion and creativity and innovation (B = 0.209, t-value = 3.204) and finally a positive and meaningful relationship between openness and creativity and innovation (B = 0.225, t-value = 3.717). However, the study did not confirm any relationship between agreeableness as well as conscientiousness and creativity & innovation.

This study examines the relationship between the returns of two value and growth portfolios and the return of market on 15 selected firms on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2008-2011. The study divides the firms into two groups in terms of the ratios of price on earning as well as price on book value into two groups of value and growth portfolios. Using some regression analysis, the study has determined a positive and meaningful relationship between value portfolio and market return when the market is on the upside but this relationship is not meaningful during the bear session. The results indicate that during the bull sessions, value portfolios provide better investment opportunities than growth ones do.

This study examines the male and female employee’s ideas about the organizational barriers to women's occupational promotion to management level in the organization of Education and Training in Khuzestan province. In this regard, with study of identified population, hypothesis was formulated and questionnaires with a five-item Likert scale and method of Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient were adjusted. Questionnaires were distributed among 300 of employees, whose educations were beyond associate degree, including teaching and administrative staff. Due to incomplete or non-completion of questionnaires, statistical operations have been carried out on 288 questionnaires. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. The research method in this survey was descriptive in which all hypotheses, that had 0.05 level of significance, were confirmed. Finally, the results showed that there were relationships between institutional barriers and women's occupational promotion to management’s levels. Furthermore, female staff had higher evaluation of the effect of organizational barriers to women's occupational promotion to management’s levels than other group. Finally, practical suggestions and recommendations to promote women's occupation to management’s levels were presented in this paper.

Profit distribution is one of the most debatable subjects in financial field. Opposite theoretical models that sometimes, do not have a strong empirical support look for the explanation of corporate dividend policy. In this paper, the relationship between profit sharing policy and auditor's and managers’ expected profit is studied. The study gathers the necessary information of 99 firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2002-2011. The implementation of regression analysis shows that there was more explanatory power of auditors’ expected profit than managers’ expected profit in dividends. The results also show that there was no meaningful difference between auditors` expected profit and managers` expected profit.

Knowledge management plays essential role for the success of organizations. Strategy formulation is one of the modern environmental requirements in the field of knowledge management and it helps and supports different parts of the organization to identify opportunities. The primary objective of this research is to evaluate the relationship between strategic knowledge management and value creation as well as opportunities abduction. Statistical population of our study is small and medium businesses in Shams Abad, Tehran. The survey is accomplished in three industries including textiles, drinking and edible. The study investigates different hypotheses on knowledge management and the results indicate that the strategies of business and saving knowledge did not have any direct effect on opportunity abduction.

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.