This article evaluates the relationship between institutional ownership and compositional performance indices in company life cycle among corporations accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange comparatively. In representation relations owner’s goal in maximum wealth; therefore, the goal controls the representative work and evaluates his performance. The statistical society in this research consists of corporations accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2006-2010. A cross-sectional regression of corporations is obtained and along with different stages of life cycle, their variance is analyzed. The results of this research indicate that:

1. In corporations’ growth stage, institutional ownership causes increasing assimilation performance and decreasing economic and financial performance.
2. In maturity stage, institutional ownership causes increasing assimilation performance but it has no effect on financial performance and it has a twofold effect on economic performance.
3. In decline stage, institutional ownership has a twofold effect on assimilation performance and it causes decreasing economic and financial performance.

One of the primary assumptions in accounting industries is to expect an increase (decrease) in cost of production is proportion to increase (decrease) in sales revenue. However, there are some evidences that the cost of production does not decrease with the same trend as revenue decreases. This phenomenon is called sticky behavior since the cost of production in not reduced as the sales decreases especially in operating as well as administration department. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study sticky behavior on 70 selected firms from Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2002-2011. The results indicate that sales and general administration cost (SGA) as well as the costs of sold goods strongly have sticky behaviors.

Electronic learning is getting popular in the world and more universities are offering various courses through internet. This paper presents an empirical investigation on effectiveness of electronic courses in one of Iranian universities whose students were enrolled on electronic learning. The proposed study designs a questionnaire to measure the effects of this program in terms of teaching, administration and electronic content, and distributes it among 354 randomly selected students. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.97, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The study gathers all inputs in Likert scale in terms of linguistic variables. The study uses ANFIS to measure to analyze the data and the results indicate that electronic learning itself maintains the highest popularity among students (0.618) followed by electronic content (0.569) and administration efforts (0.563).

During the past few years, there has been growing interest to use unified modeling language (UML) to consider the functional requirements. However, lacking a tool to detect the accuracy and the logic of diagrams in this language makes a formal model indispensable. In this study, conversion of primary UML model of a system to a colored Petri net has been accomplished in order to examine the precision of the model. For this purpose, first the definition of priority and implementation tags for UML activity diagram are provided; then it is turned into colored Petri net. Second, the proposed model provides translated tags in terms of net transitions and some monitors are used to control the system characteristics. Finally, an executable model of UML activity diagram is provided so that the designer could simulate the model by using the simulation results to detect and to refine the problems of the model. In addition, by checking the results, we find out the proposed method enhances authenticity and accuracy of early models and the ratio of system validation increases compared with previous methods.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to find the relationship between consumer’s behaviors towards well-known luxury brands in Iranian market. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 250 randomly people who purchase luxury products. The study investigates the effects of three variables including perception value, social normality and need for being exclusive on perception of a brand for motivating customers to purchase luxury products. In addition, the study tries to find out whether customers’ educational backgrounds influence on purchasing luxury products or not. Cronbach alphas are all well above the minimum acceptable level, which validates the survey. Using structural equation modeling, the study confirms all hypotheses of the survey.

During the past two decades, there have been growing interests on developing websites to build a link between various groups of people to share their knowledge such as Google service. This kind of activity helps fast and reliable distribution of knowledge since someone disseminates a question and various people attempt to provide some responses. This paper presents a system dynamic method for investigating the relationships between various components of a benchmark site. The proposed study develops closed loop dynamic among various components of the survey and provides some necessary actions for development of such systems. The results of our survey have indicated that the new forum could end up having significant number of unanswered questions. Therefore, researchers who work for this forum are suggested to increase their skills and their response rates to reduce the rate of unanswered questions.

During the past few years, there have been some evidences to believe that organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) could significantly influence on the success of organizations. This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of OCB on human resource management. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some 260 experts who worked for an Iranian auto industry. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale, examines three hypotheses including the relationship between conscientiousness and information quality, courtesy and work efficiency and between civic virtue and work efficiency. Cronbach alphas for Courtesy, Civic virtue and Information Quality are calculated as 0.75, 0.76 and 0.81, respectively. Using structural equation modeling, the study has confirmed existence of positive and meaningful relationships among various components of the survey, which confirms all three hypotheses of the survey.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of intellectual capital on firm performance. The proposed study uses two regression models to find out whether there is any meaningful relationship between intellectual capital and Tobin’s Q as well as earnings per share (EPS). To test the research hypothesis, a sample of 19 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2010-2012 based on panel method is chosen. The study uses the method originally proposed by Pulic to measure intellectual capital. The results of the implementation of two regressions analysis indicate that there were not any meaningful relationships between these two components. Therefore, the results indicate that the intellectual capital has no effect on firm performance.

This study examines the impact of corporate governance structure and free cash flow on over-investment on 121 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2008-2011. To measure over-investment, free cash flow and corporate governance variables based on available information reported on financial statements are gathered and using cross section regression method, different hypotheses of the survey are examined. The results indicate that among corporate governance mechanisms investigated in survey, there is a significant relationship between percentage of non-executive directors and ownership concentration with over-investment. However, there was no meaningful relationship among controlling shareholders and duality with over-investment. Furthermore, a significant relationship between free cash flow and over-investment has been found.