Entrepreneurs are the driving force behind the prospect and growth of the societies. Sound and wise decisions pave the way for them to carry out these highly important functions. Entrepreneurs are to discover and exploit opportunities. Therefore, they must gather sufficient and pertinent information. Entrepreneurs, like most human beings face complex and ambiguous decision-making situations, not to mention their lack of time and source to gather and process the data. Under these circumstances, entrepreneurs are prone making biases decisions. There are many reasons identified for this entrepreneurial decision making biases, such as the high cost of rational decision making, limitations in information processing, differences in their styles and procedures, or information overload, environmental complexity, environmental uncertainty. These biases are neither totally harmful nor completely useful and have to be seen as natural human characteristics. What makes entrepreneurial decision-making biases important is their effects on the decisions and thus the outcome of the enterprises. Entrepreneurial decision-making biases, deliberate or unintentional can seal the fate of the enterprises, therefore studying them meticulously is crucial. Literature has shown that experience could be an effective factor in decision-making biases. In this paper, we try to find out the impact of experience in Iranian high tech entrepreneurs’ major decision-making biases by a qualitative approach. Finally, it was concluded that experience is influential in shaping overconfidence bias.

Tendency to industrial clustering at the end of the twentieth century was a turning point in industrial development programs in most countries of the world. Industrial clustering is a model of industrial organization, which has entered industrial literature as a new development strategy. Clustering has provided utilization of efficiencies of scale and aggregation as well as efficiencies of collective efforts by creating conditions for competitiveness advantage, economical growth and export development in the international environment. Today, industrial clustering has been considered as a fundamental strategy for economic development and growth in almost all countries of the world including Iran. This paper aims to assess and to explain important factors affecting the competitiveness of industrial clusters. It also shows the relationship among these factors together. The proposed study uses fuzzy DEMATEL technique; hence, the affecting factors of competitiveness of industrial clusters in the automotive cluster in one of the provinces of Iran is investigated and the importance of each of these factors and their relationships are identified.

Torrance tests of creative thinking have been widely used to measure the impact of different items such as creativity on different groups of children. In this study, we perform an empirical study to measure the effects of endurance, power-based and flexibility on a group of children's creativity, originality and flexibility. The study chooses a sample of 341 from 2978 preschool children and distributes a questionnaire among them where 153 were female and 188 of them were male. Cronbach alpha for creativity, originality and fluency were calculated as 0.814, 0.822 and 0.788, respectively. The results of our study indicate that there are some positive and meaningful relationship among three components of creativity, originality and fluency before and after accomplishing test. The impact of test was measured for three types of sport activities including endurance, power-based and flexibility tests. After applying 32 sessions of sporting games, flexibility games represent a mean value of 32.40, which is higher than the other two tests and it maintains meaningful value compared with two other sporting tests of endurance and power base tests.

During the last decades, the importance of small firms as one of the main economical parts in each country has been proved. Considering to the resources limitation in one hand, and the competitive global market in the other hand, it is very important that firms can obtain sustainable competitive advantages (SCAs) to compete with other rivals. This paper, at the first step, tries to explore the potentially SCAs of Qom & apos; s small firms by using of Structural Equation Model (SEM). Then, the real current situation of firms in using these competitive advantages has been examined. The results tell that except firms & apos; location, other potentially SCAs do not have acceptable condition.

Intellectual capital is a type of asset measuring ability of economic agency in order tomake wealth. These assets do not have physical and objective nature and are intangible assets being achieved through utilization of relative assets with human resources, organizational operation and foreign relations from economic agency. Measuring this issue is important from intra-organizational and extra-organizational views. In this paper, we present survey based on Fuzzy TOPSIS to find important factors influencing intellectual capital management. The proposed model of this paper considers different factors, which exist in the literature and prioritize them based on different criteria. The results of our survey identified seven items as the most influencing factors.

One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients’ demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff preference optimization framework solved with a greedy double swap heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by implementing it on open source spreadsheet software.

In this paper, we consider job shop scheduling and machine location problem, simultaneously. Processing, transportation, and setup times are defined as deterministic parameters. The purpose of this paper is to determine machine location and job scheduling such that the make span and transportation cost is minimized. Therefore, the proposed model is a multi-objective problem one, where the first objective function minimizes make span and another minimizes the transportation cost. To solve the multi-objective problem, two methods are evaluated. Considering combination of job shop scheduling problem and machine location problem makes the proposed model more complex than job shop scheduling problem, which is an NP-hard problem. Therefore, to solve the proposed model, genetic algorithm as a meta-heuristic algorithm is implemented. To show the efficiency of the proposed genetic algorithm, 6×6 job shop scheduling problems are considered.

Ecotourism is one of the most popular methods in green economy and it can generate wealth and develop the economy of developing countries. Ecotourism supports environmental conservation, creates economic opportunities by emphasizing on benefits of the local community, and suggests that the involvement of the residents plays important role for the efficient management of tourism. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the impact of ecotourism on developing the economy of a historical place located in south west of Iran called Seydan. The proposed study distributes some questionnaires among 400 randomly selected people who participate in our survey. The results confirm that ecotourism can contribute the economy of the region, significantly. We also perform a comprehensive strategic planning to find out more about strength, weakness, treats and opportunities surrounding the region.

Management of energy plays an important role on having sustainable growth on the economy of developing countries. Electricity is part of the main infrastructure of any country, it can help develop many industries, and any shortage in electricity can jeopardize many heavy industries. In Iran, for many years electricity used to be subsided by the government hoping that economy grows faster but this caused a major problem for this industry since the electricity industry could not handle its expenses and faced with somewhat irreversible crises. In this paper, we present a system dynamic investigation to study the existing crises in this sector. The preliminary result of the implementation of system dynamic is that the sector needs to increase its productivity, significantly and lowers the cost of product.

Performance-based budgeting (PBB) is the latest attempt to use performance indicators in allocation of resources in public sector. PBB experts normally attempt to place emphasis on output and outcome instead of input. Iran has made efforts to establish the PBB system but so far this goal has not been realized. The methodology of the research is descriptive by the means of survey-analytical approach. In the research, the possibility of establishment of PBB in Iran is examined from three perspectives (Policymaking, Implementing, and Monitoring). The conceptual model of this research is formed with a comprehensive review of literature of PBB all over the world. At first, with an extensive review of literature in the countries who implemented PBB or trying to implement it, we identify all variables, which are necessary for a suitable Performance Budgeting model. Then the PBB experts test the necessity of these variables in Iran and finally the existence has been proved by the statistical methods with the Iranian model.