In the present paper, a novel intuitionistic fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) is proposed for modelling and solving analytical hierarchy process (AHP) problems with small amount of relationship among various criteria. Assigning a membership degree, fuzzy sets can model some uncertainty to the decision space. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets model the uncertainty more accurately associated with both membership and non-membership degree. Based on advantages of Intuitionistic fuzzy sets, this paper first uses IF-AHP to evaluate the weighting for each criterion and then develops an intuitionistic fuzzy DEMATEL method to establish contextual relationships among those criteria. Finally, an integrated IF-DEMATEL-AHP method is proposed and used for a case study for selecting managers in the automobile industry in Iran.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between bank debt guarantee and profitability, increase in banks resources and customer retention. The proposed study has been implemented in one of Iranian banks located in city of Zanjan, Iran over the period of 10 years. The study has used Pearson correlation test to examine three hypotheses of the survey. The results indicate that there were positive and meaningful relationship between bank debt guarantee and profitability (r = 0.863, P-value = 0.001), a positive relationship between bank debt guarantee and bank resources (r = 0.708 with P-value = 0.015) and there was a positive and meaningful relationship between bank debt guarantee and customer retention (r = 0.252 with P-value = 0.001).

By everyday development of storage and communicational and electronic media, there are significant amount of information being collected and stored in different forms such as electronic documents and document databases makes it difficult to process them, properly. To extract knowledge from this large volume of documental data, we require the use of documents organizing and indexing methods. Among these methods, we can consider clustering and classification methods where the objective is to organize documents and to increase the speed of accessing to required information. In most of document clustering methods, the clustering is mostly executed based on word frequency and considering document as a bag of words. In this essay, in order to decrease the number of features and to choose basic document feature, we use background knowledge and word clustering methods. In fact by using WordNet ontology, background knowledge and clustering method, the similar words of documents are clustered and the clusters with the number of words more than threshold are chosen and then their frequency of words is accepted as the effective features of document. The results of this proposed method simulation shows that the documents dimensions are decreased effectively and consequently the performance of documents clustering is increased.

Building Maintenance plays an important role throughout the building lifecycle from devis-ing conceptual plans to the end. Due to the high cost of building maintenance and the direct impact of maintenance effectiveness on the quality of life of building occupants, special attention must be devoted. One of the most important issues in this field is building maintenance contractor selection. This issue becomes even more critical in public buildings, such as hospitals, offices, and military centers. The purpose of this study is to present a method that can be used to select the contractor in such a way that the response robustness is high and the employed method is the most accurate one among other similar methods. To do this, the contractors are ranked by 7 multi-criteria decision-making methods. Then, the Spearman correlation coefficients are obtained for each pair of methods. When there is a significant difference between the outcomes of the methods, the output of each method is compared with the output of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model. The method with the least difference with the neural network output is taken as the superior method. After selecting the best method, a robustness analysis is performed on it to verify the stability of the answer. The proposed model is implemented on a real case study. Statistical analysis shows that the implementation of this method has increased the satisfaction of the residents.

One of the most important methods for building good marketing strategy is to learn more about existing competitors, suppliers, etc. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between wholesalers, bargaining pricing, new rivals and pricing strategy on preparing appropriate marketing strategy in meat market in city of shiraz, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 200 experts in this market. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 97.3%, which validates the overall survey. The results of the implementation of Pearson correlation ratio indicate that there were some positive and meaningful relationships between all components of the survey with marketing strategy.

Positive affectivity and affective management are among important issues for the most desirable effectiveness of employees in the workplace. Accordingly, in this research, the role of meaning and spirituality at workplace is considered for job happiness, positive affect and job satisfaction. To this end, within a correlation study, with the selection of two hundred and four employees of two custom organizations in Esfahan and Tehran, in Iran, who answer meaning and spirituality at work, job happiness, positive affect and job satisfaction questionnaires, the research hypotheses have been tested through Pearson & apos; s correlation and structural equation modeling. The results showed that there were significant relationships between meaning and spirituality at work, job happiness, positive affect and job satisfaction. Results of structure equation modeling revealed that during two chain models, at first meaning and spirituality at work are linked to job happiness and positive effect. Then job happiness and positive effect cause reinforcement of job satisfaction. The results of this study showed that meaning and spirituality at work cause positive affective spillover from job happiness and positive affect to job satisfaction.

Cell formation process is one of the first and the most important steps in designing cellular manufacturing systems. It consists of identifying part families according to the similarities in the design, shape, and presses of parts and dedicating machines to each part family based on the operations required by the parts. In this study, a hybrid method based on a combination of simulated annealing algorithm and dynamic programming was developed to solve a bi-objective cell formation problem with duplicate machines. In the proposed hybrid method, each solution was represented as a permutation of parts, which is created by simulated annealing algorithm, and dynamic programming was used to partition this permutation into part families and determine the number of machines in each cell such that the total dissimilarity between the parts and the total machine investment cost are minimized. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated by performing numerical experiments in different sizes. Our computational experiments indicated that the results were very encouraging in terms of computational time and solution quality.

There are many evidences to believe that investors’ personal characteristics influence on their financial decisions when they purchase stocks, bounds, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study the effects of 20 personal characteristics on 52 managers of mutual funds in Iran. Using Pearson correlation test, the study has detected that seven factors including anchoring & adjustment, framing, over confidence, illusion of control, hindsight, recency and self-attribution positively influence on investors’ behaviors. In addition, five factors including consistency, self-control, loss aversion, regret aversion and availability negatively influence on investors’ behaviors. However, the study did not find any evidence to confirm any kind of relationship of representativeness, conservatism, ambiguity aversion, optimism, mental accounting, confirmation and status quo on investors’ behaviors.

This paper performs an empirical investigation on employees’ business intelligence and customer relationship management and their effects on customer satisfaction. The proposed study has been implemented among 625 people, 240 sales representative and 385 regular customers, who are involved with products of an Iranian automaker named Iran Khodro. The proposed study designs three questionnaires in Likert scale for business intelligence, customer relationship management and customer satisfaction and Cronbach alpha have been calculated for these three questionnaires as 0.85, 0.84 and 0.78, respectively. The study distributes the questionnaires among groups, employees as well as customers, and using one-way t-student test as well as regression technique the study finds that business intelligence and customer relationship management are within an acceptable limit (P & LT; 0.01) and they positively influence on customers’ satisfaction (P & LT; 0.01).

For many years, supplier selection as an important multi-criteria decision has attracted both the researchers and practitioners. Recently, high incidences of natural disasters, terrorism attacks, labor strikes, and other kinds of risks, also known as disruptions, indicate the vulnerability of procurement process to these unpredicted events. In this study, a new framework is introduced to select suppliers while considering the supply risks. In the proposed framework, an expert is asked to determine the reliability of each procurement element (i.e., production, transportation, and communication) based on some proposed risk factors. Then, a distinct Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) network is trained to play the role of the expert opinion for estimating the reliability scores of each procurement. In addition to reliabilities, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to take into account the conventional selection criteria: price, delivery, quality, and capacity. A set of Pareto-optimal suppliers is obtained from the combination of efficiencies and reliability scores. Finally, the decision maker is recommended to choose between the non-dominated suppliers. Obtained experiment results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.