This paper presents an empirical investigation to the study the effects of various factors such as free cash flow, earnings, Tobin’s Q on predicting stock performance on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) over the period 2005-2012. The study is performed on data from different industries including basic metals, cements, chemical, auto industry, etc. The proposed model gathers the necessary data from TSE and using various regression models, the study has determined that there was a meaningful relationship between cash value added, Earnings and Tobin’s Q when the level of significance was five percent but there was not any meaningful relationship between stock earnings and free cash flow.

Export is one of the most important indicators of a growing economy and it is the primary source of reaching sustainable growth on the market. This paper presents an empirical study to determine important factors influencing electronic banking in export development of Iranian organizations. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some regular customers who do internet banking with Parsian bank in city of Tehran, Iran. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.82, which is well above the minimum desirable limit of 0.70. In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.71 and 1955 with Sig. = 0.000, respectively. Using principal component analysis, the study has detected six factors including customer’s information, building trust, secure internet access, having good internet infrastructure and internet users.

This paper presents an empirical investigation for the implementation of enterprise resource planning among 58 production units in province of Ilam, Iran. The proposed study of this paper considers the readiness in terms of six factors including human resources, financial resources, infrastructures, quality control, and information systems and communication technology. Using structural equation modeling, the study examines six hypotheses and the implementation is accomplished on LISREL software package. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.91, which is well above the minimum desirable level. The results of the survey have indicated that all six mentioned factors influence positively on ERP implementation and for a successful implementation of ERP, it is suggested to consider these factors, seriously.

The hub location problem involves a network of origins and destinations over which transportation takes place. There are many studies associated with finding the location of hub nodes and the allocation of demand nodes to these located hub nodes to transfer the only one kind of commodity under one level of service. However, in this study, carrying different commodity types from origin to destination under various levels of services (e.g. price, punctuality, reliability or transit time) is studied. Quality of services experienced by users such as speed, convenience, comfort and security of transportation facilities and services is considered as the level of service. In each system, different kinds of commodities with various levels of services can be transmitted. The appropriate level of service that a commodity can be transmitted through is chosen by customer preferences and the specification of the commodity. So, a mixed integer programming formulation for single allocation hub covering location problem, which is based on the idea of transferring multi commodity flows under multi levels of service is presented. These two are applied concepts, multi-commodity and multi-level of service, which make the model & apos; s assumptions closer to the real world problems. In addition, a differential evolution algorithm is designed to find near-optimal solutions. The obtained solutions using differential evolution (DE) algorithm (upper bound), where its parameters are tuned by response surface methodology, are compared with exact solutions and computed lower bounds by linear relaxation technique to prove the efficiency of proposed DE algorithm.

During the past few decades, many organizations have attempted to reduce their costs through outsourcing of non-value added activities. This paper presents an empirical investigation to find important factors on reducing production expenses through outsourcing activities. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 19 questions and distributes it among some experts. Using structural equation modeling, the study investigates different variables and the results indicate that outsourcing could reduce the production cost through time, inventory and human resources. The implementation of Freedman for ranking these factors indicate that time played the most influential factor followed by inventory and human resources. The results of structural equation modeling indicate that there are some positive and meaningful relationship between human capital and cost (B=0.78, t-value = 9.38), a positive and meaningful relationship between inventory and cost (B=0.81, t-value=10.54) and a positive and meaningful relationship between time and cost (B=0.89, t-value = 11.26).

Customer satisfaction plays essential role on the success of industrial products such as milk in todays’ marketing planning. In this paper, we present a conceptual model to measure the relative impact of various factors on customer satisfaction. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among managers of a dairy producer named Pegah in city of Esfahan, Iran. Using Pearson correlation ratio as well as stepwise regression technique, the study has found positive and meaningful relationship between customer satisfaction and price, quality of product, distribution and compatibility with customer expectation. In addition, the study detects a negative and meaningful relationship between conflict and customer satisfaction.

Recovery of used products has steadily become interesting issue for research due to economic reasons and growing environmental or legislative concern. This paper presents a closed-loop logistics network design based on reverse logistics models. A mixed integer linear programming model is implemented to integrate logistics network design in order to prevent the sub-optimality caused by the separate design of the forward and reverse networks. The study presents a single product and multi-stage logistics network problem for the new and return products not only to determine subsets of logistics centers to be opened, but also to determine transportation strategy, which satisfies demand imposed by facilities and minimizes fixed opening and total shipping costs. Since the deterministic estimation of some parameters such as demand and rate of return of used products in closed loop logistics models is impractical, an uncertain programming is proposed. In this case, we assume there are several economic conditions with predefined probabilities calculated from historical data. Then by means of expert & apos; s opinion, a fuzzy variable is offered as customer & apos; s demand under each economic condition. In addition, demand and rate of return of products for each customer zone is presented by fuzzy-random variables, similarly. Therefore, a fuzzy-random programming is used and a priority-based genetic algorithm is proposed to solve large-scale problems.

Nowadays, management of funds in different governmental organizations plays essential role in accessing desirable objectives and in controlling operations efficiently and effectively. Performance-based budgeting (PBB) is the practice of developing budgets based on the relationship between planned funding levels and anticipated results from the plan. The performance-based budgeting process is a technique where the administrators can apply to manage more cost-efficient and effective budgeting programs. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to find out whether it is possible to apply PBB in various Iranian municipalities or not. The proposed study detects different barriers in terms of strategy, execution and monitoring through a questionnaire and investigations whether removing the important trouble making issues could help management team apply PBB with an adaptation of activity based cost method or net. The results indicate that management of some Iranian municipalities could successfully implement PBB within organization when major barriers are removed.

During the past few years, there has been tremendous increase in advertisement expenses all over the world. Therefore, it is important to examine, to investigate and to evaluate the performance of advertisement to reach organizations’ objectives. This paper presents an empirical investigation using highly reliable and efficient method called AIDA, which consists of four factors: attention, interest, desire and action. The study is implemented for one of Iranian food suppliers called TABAROK located in city of Mashad, Iran. The survey selects a sample of 300 regular customers and distributes a standard questionnaire among them. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.93, which is well above the minimum desirable level. Using Spearman correlation test, the study confirms that all four components of the survey influences consumer behavior, positively. The study also indicates that there were some positive and meaningful correlations among various components of the survey. In addition, applying Freedman test indicates that advertisement has the highest impact on convincing consumer to purchase product.

Alcohol is the most prevalent abused drug in the world and brings out a large amount of medical expenses to the society. This paper presents an empirical investigation to devise preventive measures and identify the groups at risk. In this study, a descriptive study was conducted among people who were arrested by the police because of committing illegal actions and were suspected of alcohol usage were referred to the organization of forensic medicine. The studied variables include gender, age, state of affair, marital status, type of crime, the time of drug use, tranquillizer drugs and the times of psychiatrist visit. Out of 305 subjects, 204 (66.9%) cases had a positive respiratory test result and 101 (33.1%) were negative. The results showed that committing crimes due to quarrel and wrangling (34.3%) and being drunk in the public (29.7%) were prevalent among the people who used alcohol. Driving accidents also had 18% prevalence. 32.7% of the people who had a negative respiratory test result had committed crimes because of being drunk and 29.7% of them had quarrel and wrangling. The high rate of alcohol use in people who referred from the disciplinary office to the organization of forensic medicine demonstrated that it was necessary to devise a plan in order to improve a person & apos; s awareness of harmful alcohol use and to identify the vulnerable groups in the society.