Promoting complex global environment, tremendous growth and increase of network communication technology in the world, strategic planning and foresight activities in science and technology have become very important. Gradually, organizations and businesses are realizing the importance of foresight; many organizations attempt to execute such activities. However, this concept is not still well known in our country and among our organizations. Therefore, recognizing the factors influencing the success of this concept is a kind of issues that the organizations and activists are faced. Thus, this research seeks to identify and to rank the factors, particularly in the areas of economy, and it has developed five hypotheses. In this paper, factors affecting the success of foresight are given in four groups of rational, structure, scope, and results. Data collection for this study is a questionnaire and the binomial tests, Pearson correlation and Friedman test have been used to prove the hypothesis. According to the analysis of data obtained from the questionnaire conducted by SPSS software, all research hypotheses were confirmed. It also became clear that the rational component had the greatest impact on the future success of science and technology in the field of economic.

Ecotourism, as a multibillion dollars business, is an industry with high potentials for economic competition. One of the proper solutions for developing ecotourism is better identification of different regions where there is a tourism capacity and accurate planning for performing feasibility study of those regions in terms of attracting ecotourism as well as creating infrastructures in those regions. This paper evaluates capacities and power of tourism as well as nature tourism in Isfahan Township using Geographic Information System and Analytical Hierarchy Process. The present research is applied and research method is descriptive-analytical. Meanwhile, to analyze data, Arc GIS is used. Findings indicate that regarding the map of ecotourism capacity of Isfahan townships, resulted from combining various climatologically, geological, hydrological, topological maps and access maps, the township is not homogeneous in terms of nature tourism and coastal parts of the township (regions around Zayand-e-Rood) have better condition than other parts and should be considered for tourism development planning.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of different factors influencing on marketing in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in city of Tehran, Iran. The study has been accomplished among 57 SMEs out of 70 active business units who were involved in hand made carpet. The survey uses a questionnaire originally developed by Merrilees et al. (2011) [Merrilees, B., Rundle-Thiele, S., & Lye, A. (2011). Marketing capabilities: Antecedents and implications for B2B SME performance. Industrial Marketing Management, 40(3), 368-375.] to determine the factors influencing on marketing SMEs. Using structural equation modeling, the results of survey indicate that market orientation, management capability, innovation capability and brand capability of SME & apos; s marketing performance influence on development of marketing, positively.

The boom of Internet usage and the significant funding dynamism in electronic banking have attracted the attention of researchers towards Internet banking. In the past, the traditional focus of Internet banking research has been on technological development, but it is now switching to user-focused research. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine determinants of user acceptance of internet banking. The proposed study uses Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to measure the relationships between different factors in a case study of Iranian firm. The results indicate that trust is the most important factor for development of internet banking.

In this study, we provide six complementary models of data envelopment analysis to analyze the financial efficiency of chosen decision-making units for firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange. For this purpose, we consider tapered modeling, the concept of accounting costs and economic costs and divide the whole process into the two sub-processes in modeling. After the modeling process, we choose the seventeen companies and thereby, provide a new method for analyzing the financial efficiency. The proposed method seems to be more appropriate than the methods proposed in the past and it can deliver better understanding of real-world cases. Finally, we understand that how this method works for analyzing the financial efficiency of organizations.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of different factors influencing empowering employees in banking industry. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, which contains three components of individual, job related and organizational related factors. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.88, which is well above the minimum acceptable level of 0.7. Using stepwise regression analysis, the study has detected a positive and meaningful relationship between employee performance and three individual, job related and organizational issues. In addition, the implementation of Freedman test indicates that organizational based factors were number one priority on employee performance followed by job related factors and individual factors.

This paper studies the relationship between transcendental leadership and organizational citizenship behavior by investigating the role of spirituality in the workplace as a mediator. The study is executed for a case study of an Iranian insurance firm located in city of Tehran, Iran. The survey uses three questionnaires for transcendental leadership, spirituality in the workplace and organizational citizenship behavior. The results indicate that there were some meaningful relationships between the components of transcendental leadership and organizational citizenship behavior and element of spirituality in the workplace and organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, the study indicates that there were positive and meaningful relationships between vision/hope/faith and spiritual traditions, between components of transcendental and spiritual rituals, between oriented leadership and ultimately transcendent and spiritual components of oriented leadership. However, the study does not find any relationship between the two components of love, friendship and leaders’ spiritual growth and its subordinates and variable of oriented tradition of spirituality.

The purpose of this paper is to determine and prioritize factors influencing on brand equity in consumer’s point of view for a case study of Samsung appliance consumers in city of Tehran, Iran. The study investigates the effects of four factors in terms of the customer & apos; s perspective, price, advertisement, family and brand image, by dimensions of brand equity, perceived quality, brand awareness, brand association, brand loyalty, on brand equity. The research method is based on a descriptive-survey research. The questionnaire includes Samsung consumers in city of Tehran, Iran. To test the hypotheses, SPSS and LISREL software packages are used. For data analysis, descriptive statistics and inferential statistical tests including structural equation modeling and path analysis are used. The results of the survey have indicated that family and brand image influence positively on brand equity but the effects of advertisement and price on brand equity were not confirmed.

Flight interruption is one of the most important issues in today’s airline industry. Every year, most airlines spend significant amount of money to compensate flight delays. Therefore, it is important to detect important factors influencing on flight delays. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine important factors on this issue. The study also asks some decision makers to make pairwise comparison and ranks various factors using the art of analytical hierarchy process. The study determines that technical defects and delayed entry were among the most important factors to blame for flight delays. In addition, announcing the postponement, replacement aircraft and path replacement are among the most important decisions facing managers in the aviation industry during the disruption of the flight.

This paper studies the effect of the ratios of P/E and PEG on stock returns of the firms accepted on Tehran Stock Exchange. The study uses regression and Pearson Correlation Coefficient based on the performance of 138 firms over the period 2004- 2009 according to the Iranian calendar to investigate the effects of P/E and PEG on stock returns. The study also uses the models originally proposed by Chahin and Choudhry (2010) [Chahin, S., & Choudhry, T. (2010). Price to earnings, growth radio and value growth based strategies. Social Science Research Network, 19(4).] to discuss the strategies of investing on stocks. The results show that the ratio of P/E had more effect on stock returns than the ratio of PEG and stocks returns had a direct relationship with P/E and an inverse relationship with PEG. In addition, the returns of growth stock were more than value stock.