This study explains the components of ethical behavior and their impacts on life insurance companies in province of Mazandaran, Iran. There were 367 insurance representatives and the study selects a sample of 187 ones based on Cochran formula and 2 questionnaires were distributed among them. The first questionnaire, unethical behavior, includes 8 items including Bribery, Cheating, Deception, Interact with colleagues, Act as social behavior, Uncommitted to firm and Irresponsibility. In addition, the questionnaire of brand equity contains three components of Awareness, Perceived quality and Loyalty. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined that the effects of cheating and deception on unethical behaviors were not confirmed but the effects of other factors, bribery, interact with colleagues, act as social behavior, uncommitted to firm and irresponsibility on unethical behavior were confirmed. In addition, three components of Awareness, Perceived quality and Loyalty had positive relationship with brand equity.

This paper studies the relationship between principals’ reward power and their conflict management styles. The five conflict management styles that we use in this study are based on Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and include accommodating, avoiding, collaborating, competing, and compromising styles. This study can be classified as a regression analysis and is a descriptive study. Our statistical society for this research included all principals of high schools located in the city of Birjand. The results indicated that there was a significant relationship between principal’s reward power and accommodating conflict management style. The results also revealed that there was no significant relationship between principals’ reward power and the other four conflict management styles.

This paper aims to provide proper policies for inventory under uncertain conditions by comparing different inventory policies. To review the efficiency of these algorithms it is necessary to specify the area in which each of them is applied. Therefore, each of the models has been reviewed under different forms of retailing and they are ranked in terms of their expenses. According to the high values of inventories and their impacts on the costs of the companies, the ranking of various models using the simulation annealing algorithm are presented, which indicates that the proposed model of this paper could perform better than other alternative ones. The results also indicate that the suggested algorithm could save from 4 to 29 percent on costs of inventories.

The single machine scheduling problem aims at obtaining the best sequence for a set of jobs in a manufacturing system with a single machine. In this paper, we optimize rewards in single machine scheduling in rewards-driven systems such that total reward is maximized while the constraints contains of limitation in total rewards for earliness and learning, independent of earliness and learning and etc. are satisfied. In mentioned systems as for earliness and learning the bonus is awarded to operators, we consider only rewards in mentioned systems and it will not be penalized under any circumstances. Our objective is to optimize total rewards in mentioned system by taking the rewards in the form of quadratic for both learning and earliness. The recently-developed sequential quadratic programming (SQP), is used by solve the problem. Results show that SQP had satisfactory performance in terms of optimum solutions, number of iterations, infeasibility and optimality error. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed on the change rate of the objective function obtained based on the change rate of the “amount of earliness for jobs (Ei parameter)”.

In this paper an attempt is made to analyze the components of localization strategy including attribute policy, benefits policy, application/implementation policy, consumer policy, competition policy, quality/price policy and product category policy on development of brand equity. The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring bran equity, which is adopted from Buil et al. (2013) [Buil, I., de Chernatony, L., & Mart?nez, E. (2013). Examining the role of advertising and sales promotions in brand equity creation. Journal of Business Research, 66(1), 115-122.], and the other for measuring localization strategy designed by researchers. Cronbach alphas for brand equity and localization strategy are 0.82 and 0.78, respectively. The study is applied among consumers of products with a name of Samsung in city of Tehran, Iran. Using Pearson correlation as well as multiple regression technique, the study has determined that attribute, consumer and application/implementation policies influenced positively on brand equity.

Recommender systems help users faced with the problem of information overflow and provide personalized recommendations. Social networks are used for providing variety of business or social activities, or sometimes a combination of both. In this paper, by considering social network of users and according to users’ context and items, a new method is introduced that is based on trust and context aware for recommender systems in social networks. The purpose of this paper is to create a recommender system which increases precision of predicted ratings for all users especially for cold start users. In the proposed method, walking on web of trust is done by neighbor users for finding rating of similar items and users’ preference is gotten of items’ context. The results show that suitable recommendation with user’s context is provided by using this method. Also, this system can increase precision of predicted rating for all users and cold starts too and however, do not decrease the rating’s coverage.

This paper investigates the role of corporate disclosure policy on risk assessment and market value on selected firms from Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2004-2012. The study considers four risk namely; business risk, cash flow risk, financial risk and systemic risk. Using regression analysis with panel data under fixed effect, the study shows that there was a meaningful relationship between two risks, business risk and systematic risk, and market value before and after corporate disclosure. In other words, after corporate disclosure, the relationship between risk and market value becomes stronger.

This paper investigates the role of exports in the regional markets on the performance of supply chain. The study first determines critical variables affecting exports for entering into the regional markets and then measures the effects of these variables on the effectiveness of supply chain performance. The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring the effects of various factors on export development and the other for measuring supply chain performance in Likert scale. Cronbach alpha for the mentioned questionnaires were calculated as 0.84 and 0.78, respectively. The population of the survey includes all small and medium enterprises active in city of Tehran, Iran and the study selects a sample of 250 people as a sample size. Using factor analysis, the study has determined seven factors including product development, government support, strategic orientation, customer satisfaction, competitive pressures, organizational capability and distribution strategies for entry into regional markets. In addition, the implementation of structural equation modeling has disclosed that product development and distribution strategies maintained the highest impact on export activities.

This paper investigates the relationship between emotional intelligence, organizational communications and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) for a case study of Islamic Azad University, Gorgan Branch, and Sama Institution in Iran. Statistical population includes all heads and assistants and employees of Islamic Azad University and Sama Institution in city of Gorgan, Iran as 300 people. Sample size was determined as 169 people according to Korjesi and Morgan table. This research is operational by goal, and survey and correlation by method. To determine questionnaire reliability and questionnaire validity, Cronbach Alpha coefficient for emotional intelligence questionnaire, organizational communications questionnaire, and OCB questionnaire were calculated as 0.86, 0.86, 0.87 and 0.85, respectively. To analyze data and information, Pearson correlation coefficient by inferential level was used. Results indicate that there was a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and organizational communication and OCB.

Emotional intelligence is defined to guide behavior, thoughts, effective communicating with family and within organizations. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and entrepreneurship of trainees in vocational and technical organization of Zanjan in 2014. Method of this study is practical and survey method has been conducted for data collection. The population of the survey consists of 500 trainees and the study selects a sample of 300 people. The study uses two questionnaires, one for emotional intelligence based on Bar-On questionnaire and the other for entrepreneurship, which was made by authors. Reliability for Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire was calculated 0.85 by Cronbach & apos; s alpha and for entrepreneurship was 0.81. Data analysis was performed by using SPSS software and the results showed that there was a meaningful and positive relationship between entrepreneurship and all five dimensions of emotional intelligence, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, mood, impulse control and compatibility.