When aiming on improving efficiency and reducing cost in manufacturing environments, production scheduling can play an important role. Although a common workshop is full of uncertainties, when using mathematical programs researchers have mainly focused on deterministic problems. After briefly reviewing and discussing popular modeling approaches in the field of stochastic programming, this paper proposes a new approach based on utility theory for a certain range of problems and under some practical assumptions. Expected utility programming, as the proposed approach, will be compared with the other well-known methods and its meaningfulness and usefulness will be illustrated via a numerical examples and a real case.

For over two decades, telephone banking has steadily become a useful feature and all banks have tried to provide this feature as part of their services. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study the role of personal and social characteristics on acceptance of new telephone banking services. The proposed study designs two questionnaires and distributes them among 384 randomly selected people who use telephone banking in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study examines various hypotheses and the results of our survey indicate that there were some positive and meaningful relationships between perception usefulness and users’ attitude, perception and ease of use, perception and intention to use as well as perception and intention to use. In addition, the study has detected a negative and meaningful relationship between personal risk and intention to use and perception of personal time and intention to use among mobile users.

During the past few years, digital libraries have been the primary source of retrieving necessary information. IT helps many scholars have the access to recently published value added researches around the world. However, information security and copyright concerns are among the most important issues and there must be good rules and regulation to protect authors against any sort of copyright violation. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to find out about the status of copyright issues in one of Iranian libraries. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 96 librarian experts. Cronbach alpha is equal to 0.76, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The results of our investigation indicate that although expert believe the status of copyright is in desirable level when the level of significance is five percent, there are some concerns on some issues. In other words, experts believed that all copyrights are not well protected and digital libraries do not follow governmental rules and regulation on fully protecting authors’ rights. In addition, experts believed that the security of sources available on digital libraries is not well protected.

The adoption of information technology (IT) along with supply chain management (SCM) has become increasingly a necessity among most businesses. This enhances supply chain (SC) performance and helps companies achieve the organizational competitiveness. IT systems capture and analyze information and enable management to make decisions by considering a global scope across the entire SC. This paper reviews the existing literature on IT in SCM and considers pertinent criteria. Using principal component analysis (PCA) of factor analysis (FA), a number of related criteria are divided into smaller groups. Finally, SC managers can develop an IT portfolio in SCM using mean values of few extracted components on the relevance –emergency matrix. A numerical example is provided to explain details of the proposed method.

Every year, the companies with favorable perspective are entered into stock exchange through Initial public offering (IPO). This issue is a treat for share of competitors in market and usually, IPO is offered while industry is in top of its valuation, which could be corrected after offering price. In this regard, we study the relationship between IPO and long-term performance of industry, identification and explaining the effective factors. In addition, the relationship of IPS has compared with portfolios of corresponding competitors. In this study, we conclude that the portfolios of competitors had an undesirable performance three years after initial offering. Six effective variables are verified on performance including industry concentration, industry valuation and homogeneity, size of offering, industry operating leverage and industry financial leverage. Undesirable effects of industry is specified when the industry valuation is rather high, industry is in top of valuation or concentration is high in industry, also, when the homogeneity of industry is more, undesirable effect is less.

Customers are the primary sources of making appropriate decisions and their feedbacks normally help us improve the quality of systems. In this paper, we present an empirical study to detect important factors influencing managers of banking industry make better decisions. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 32 questions, distributes it among some bank managers. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.805. In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.701 and 1675, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived nine factors including customers’ welfare strategy, systems integration, organizational culture assessment, corporate strategies, organizational development, intelligence data strategies, supporting strategies, resource planning as well as research and development.

This paper investigates the relationship between financial ratios and indicator of systemic risk in the Tehran Stock Exchange. The study selects 73 manufacturing companies of the Tehran Stock Exchange market over the period 2003-2010. The study first calculates the independent variables in the form of financial ratios and then the ratios affecting the systematic risk index are extracted using entropy method. The output of this stage is the introduction of five influential financial indicators as the independent variables of the study. Using t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient the rate of independent variables effect on the systematic risk index is evaluated and finally, using stepwise regression method, the effect of independent variables on the dependent variable is examined. According to results of our survey, the correlation coefficient of such indices as “the ratio of stock price to the profit of each share”, “Current ratio”, “each share profit ratio” and “the stockholders rights return ratio” have respectively the highest correlation with the systematic risk index.

Every bank seeks methods to optimize its assets and liabilities, thus the main subject is managing assets-liabilities in the balance sheet and the main question is by which factor banks will be enabled to have an optimized combination of assets and liabilities in a common level of risk to get the most return. This case study is dedicated to Refah bank and is an applicable study. The data has collected from the headquarter by a questionnaire and finally effective factors weight on optimizing bank balance sheet determined by using Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process. Results showed that revenue has more effect on optimizing for %39.5 and also loan to deposit ratio for %.74, regarding revenue as a symbol of efficiency in banks, it seems to be the most important factor and goal in banking industry. Furthermore banks need to have some liquidity to respond customers demand to cover one of the most important risks of banking. This factor importance determined to be %18 in Refah Bank by using model and experts view.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between inflation rate and profitability ratios in the top 36 companies in the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). The study uses historical data over the period 2005-2010 and using linear regression methods examines different hypotheses. The main idea of the proposed hypotheses is that there is a significant relationship between the inflation rate and profitability ratios, and the results confirm the significant relationship between the inflation rate and profitability ratios such as return on assets (ROA) ratio, return on equity (ROE) ratio, gross profit (GPR) as well as net profit ratio (NPR). There is no significant correlation, however, between these two variables in past and future periods.

The rapid diffusion of the Internet has radically changed the delivery channels applied by the financial services industry. The aim of this study is to identify the influencing factors that encourage customers to adopt online banking in Khorramabad. The research constructs are developed based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and incorporates some extra important control variables. The model is empirically verified to study the factors influencing the online banking adoption behavior of 210 customers of Tejarat Banks in Khorramabad. The findings of the study suggest that the quality of the internet connection, the awareness of online banking and its benefits, the social influence and computer self-efficacy have significant impacts on the perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of online banking acceptance. Trust and resistance to change also have significant impact on the attitude towards the likelihood of adopting online banking.