This study develops a dynamic pricing and advertising model for perishable products under an admissible price ceiling, where prices may vary over time but cannot exceed a market-accepted upper bound, while dynamic discounts are allowed. The demand function jointly depends on the selling price, advertising-induced goodwill, and the remaining time until product expiration, a combination rarely addressed in prior research. The problem is formulated as a finite-horizon optimal control model, explicitly incorporating perishability and the price ceiling constraint. By applying Pontryagin’s maximum principle, time-dependent optimal trajectories for price and advertising are derived. Numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses illustrate how changes in price sensitivity, advertising effectiveness, and the remaining shelf life effect on demand influence optimal strategies and profitability. The results reveal critical trade-offs between pricing flexibility, advertising intensity, and perishability effects, offering practical guidance for decision-makers in food, pharmaceutical, and fast-moving consumer goods markets with fixed price tags compared to more flexible pricing environments.

Annual increases in power use need improved energy management. Several universities and research organizations have focused on pursuing energy efficiency and renewable energy to satisfy this stipulation. This study provides a thorough and organized systematic review of over 2000 operational research studies conducted between 2019 and 2023. In summary, this study explores potential innovations to enhance existing literature utilizing mathematical tools in energy management. Our systematic literature review indicates that geometric planning is a novel mathematical technique in energy management. Based on the specific problems, this paper discusses geometric planning and proposes its integration with other mathematical techniques.

Social dilemmas describe conflict situations between immediate self-interest and longer-term collective interests. In these situations, it is better that all players work together to attain a common goal, but individuals may threaten the best payoff of the group by free-riding. Human behavior in a pandemic is one example of a social dilemma but wait-and-see games and relying on herd immunity to get a free ride generates a threat of continuing the pandemic. This study aims to use probabilistic incentives given by a third party as a mechanism to inhibit free-riding behavior by promoting cooperation in the volunteer dilemma game. For more realistic human behavior simulation, we use an agent-based model of network topology. When the parameters of the problem change gradually, an abrupt jump in the cooperation rate may happen and lead to a significant shift in the outcome. Catastrophe theory is a valuable approach to survey these nonlinear changes. This study tries to give some managerial insights to the decision-makers to find the minimum level of necessary effort in which the cooperation dominates the defection.

In this study, we attempted to conduct a comprehensive review of the existing and pertinent literature on the topic of factor investment. We performed Scientometric analysis of studies published in reputable finance journals, i.e., The Journal of Portfolio Management, The Financial Analysts Journal, The Journal of Asset Management and others, during the years 2014 to 2023. To obtain the research data for our study, we gathered and examined a collection of 76 bibliographic records sourced from the Web of Science database. This database provided a comprehensive and reliable source of scholarly publications in the field of finance. To analyze the data, we employed Scientometric networks as part of our analytical approach. Scientometric networks allowed us to explore the relationships and connections between different publications, authors, and keywords within the domain of factor investment. To visualize and present the research findings, we utilized the Bibliometrix package for R, a powerful tool specifically designed for bibliometric analysis. This package enabled us to generate insightful visualizations that showcased the key patterns, trends, and interconnections within the literature on factor investment. By employing Scientometric analysis and leveraging the capabilities of the Bibliometrix package, we aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing scholarly research in this field and contribute to the understanding of factor investment.

Tehran, as one of the most populated capital cities worldwide, is categorized in the group of highly polluted cities in terms of the geographical location as well as increased number of industries, vehicles, domestic fuel consumption, intra-city trips, increased manufacturing units, and in general excessive increase in the consumption of fossil energies. City logistics models can be effectively helpful for solving the complicated problems of this city. In the present study, a queuing theory-based bi-objective mathematical model is presented, which aims to optimize the environmental and economic costs in city logistics operations. It also tries to reduce the response time in the network. The first objective is associated with all beneficiaries and the second one is applicable for perishable and necessary goods. The proposed model makes decisions on urban distribution centers location problem. Subsequently, as a case study, the fruit and vegetable distribution network of Tehran city is investigated and redesigned via the proposed modelling. The results of the implementation of the model through traditional and augmented ε-constraint methods indicate the efficiency of the proposed model in redesigning the given network.

In an environment where markets go through a volatile process, and rapid fundamental changes occur due to technological advances, it is important to ensure and maintain a good performance measurement. Organizations, in their performance evaluation, should consider different types of financial and non-financial indicators. In systems like direct sales stores in which decision units have multiple inputs and outputs, all criteria influencing on performance must be combined and examined in a system, simultaneously. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of different products through direct sales of a firm named Shirin Asal with a combination of Balanced Scorecard, fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS so that the weaknesses of subjectivity and selective consideration of evaluators in evaluating the performance indicators are reduced and evaluation integration is provided by considering the contribution of each indicator and each indicator group of balanced scorecard. The research method of this case study is applied. The data collection method is a questionnaire from the previous studies, the use of experts' opinions and the study of documents in the organization. MATLAB and SPSS were used to analyze the data. During this study, the customer and financial perspectives are of the utmost importance to assess the company branches. Among the sub-criteria, the rate of new customer acquisition in the customer dimension and the net income to sales ratio in financial dimension are of the utmost importance.

Today, urban areas have been considerably expanded, which has caused numerous problems due to the large population in metropolitan areas. City logistics models can be effective in solving complicated problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution, accidents, and high energy consumption rate. The present paper proposes a bi-objective mathematical model for designing a city logistics distribution network in order to minimize the economic and environmental costs as well as the response time. The proposed model would make decisions on the location and allocation problems in the city logistics distribution network. In fact, the objective of the problem is to select some fixed sites in order to construct the city distribution centers. The demand for commodities is considered probabilistic and the network is modeled based on the queuing theory. Furthermore, in the proposed model, the policy of putting tax on carbon and applying the low-carbon emission resources are used for establishment at the city distribution centers. Afterwards, in order to validate the proposed model, a numerical example is generated and, then, the results obtained from solving the model via epsilon constraint method are presented. Analysis of the results in the present study indicates that the proposed model was highly efficient in achieving its objectives. Finally, there are some suggestions for future studies that can be taken into account.

Research Project Supply Chain is one of the most complex supply networks. The management of this complex system has created new challenges for industry managers and engineers. The optimization of supply chain networks is, therefore, essential within the context of the research projects. The aims of this paper is to design the network of Supply Chain Management for research projects in an Iranian project-based organization. This model integrates strategic decisions in the whole life cycle for research projects using a mathematical approach. This model is a guideline for managers in research projects that will enable them to identify the strategic decisions of PSCM in their own organizations in order to resolve and improve them. It also serves as a useful base for researchers to further expand research concerning PSCM in research projects.

This research aims to offer a fuzzy approach for calculating Tehran & apos; s air pollution index. The method is based on fuzzy analysis model, and uses the information about air quality index (AQI), included on the website of Tehran’s Air Quality Monitoring And Supervision Bureau. The contrived fuzzy logic is considered a powerful tool for demonstrating the information associated with uncertainty. In the end, several graphs visualize this inferential system in various levels of pollution.

After financial crisis in 2008, the effect of crisis spread in the world. Many countries were affected quickly and others slowed in a particular mechanism. Using data of TEPIX from Tehran Stock Exchange and DJI from New York stock Exchange as the main indexes of these two markets, this paper reported strong evidence of TEPIX’s dependency on DJI after the crisis in a four-week delay. The index level series were non-stationary; therefore, we employed cointegration analysis and error correction vector autoregressions (VAR) techniques to model the interdependencies. To find the best lag time we used a heuristic method and the results surprisingly were the same as the result of applying a VAR model. The results support the hypothesis that financial stress was transmitted from the U.S to Iran primarily through trade and price channels.