Accountability is instrumental for ensuring that a trusting relationship exists between shareholders and management of corporations in order that there will be enhanced investor confidence. Towards this end, corporate governance measures are instituted to make the executives or management of business organizations accountable for their stewardships of the organizational resources or shareholders’ investments. It is against that backdrop that the Securities and Exchange Commission in Ghana has also developed a code on best practices on corporate governance. However, the extent to which the provisions in the code are consistent with the theoretical and empirical literature is unknown. This paper, therefore, sought to explore whether or not gaps exist between the corporate governance policy and practices in Ghana and extant literature. This paper achieves this by examining characteristics of the board as they exist in Ghana in relations to the literature. The characteristics examined in this paper include responsibilities, optimal size, independence, board composition, and audit and compensation committees of boards. Recommendations are made based on the literature to address gaps that exist.

A land-based gas turbine may operate at the different environment including corrosive and dusty environments. These conditions can cause early damages in the “cold” parts as well as in the “hot” parts of the gas turbine. In this research, fatigue life of a compressor blade is predicted with and without damages. Damage is considered as a notch at the blade and is classified as three types of short, medium and long notches. These are numerically simulated in the compressor blade and fatigue crack initiation life is calculated. Stress analysis is carried out using finite element analysis followed by fatigue life calculations. Furthermore, the influence of blade tip displacement on life of the undamaged and damaged blade is investigated. Moreover, the effect of damage & apos; s size and location on blade’s life is reported. This procedure can be tuned with corrosion damages observed during the minor inspection where the gas turbines are operating in the unusual environments.

Information plays an important role on having crystal clear image about market. A good awareness about products, vendors, new rivals, etc. always helps us offer better prices and reach better agreements. This paper presents an investigation on the role of industrial market information on the success of negotiations. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 22 questions, distributes it among 228 Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the numbers of questions are reduced to 17. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.773 and 745.8, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived six factors including human resource management, integrated strategy, organizational software packages, communication factors, penetration factors, past perception and assessment process.

The title compound 3-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-7,7-dimethyl-7,8-dihydrocinnolin-5(6H)-one (3) was prepared via one-pot three component reaction of 2-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-2-oxoacetaldehyde with dimedone in the presence of hydrazine hydrate and studied by the single crystal X-ray diffraction method. Its structure was also con?rmed by IR, 1H and 13C NMR spectroscopy. Compound 3 was crystallized in the monoclinic system, space group P21/c, a = 7.921(2) ?, b = 11.566(4) ?, c = 16.986(6) ?, B = 107.338(5)°, V = 1485.5(8) ?3, Z = 4, R1 = 0.0559 and wR2 = 0.1253. The crystal structure of 3 also shows a weak interaction between O3 and N2 atoms.

This paper presents the decentralized supply chain with two suppliers and two competing retailers. It also investigates the sourcing and pricing strategies of two retailers in a decentralized supply chain system under a supply disruption environment. These retailers face their individual stochastic demand markets; however, they compete with each other through a two-stage price and service operation. The interactive dynamics among retailers is characterized, including the existence and uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium in service and price games demonstrated.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management tool, which considers any manageable system as being limited in reaching more of its objectives by some constraints. According to TOC, there is always, at least, one single constraint, and TOC implements a concentrating process to detect the constraint and restructure the remaining of the organization around it. This paper presents an overview of different perspectives of TOC and its implementation in different industries such as project management, quality management, outsourcing, product mix, make-to-buy, accounting, banking and health care, etc. The results indicate that the method has been extensively implemented in different areas of accounting.

Solving resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has important role in the context of project scheduling. Considering a single objective RCPSP, the goal is to find a schedule that minimizes the makespan. This is NP-hard problem (Blazewicz et al., 1983) and one may use meta-heuristics to obtain a global optimum solution or at least a near-optimal one. Recently, various meta-heuristics such as ACO, PSO, GA, SA etc have been applied on RCPSP. Bee algorithms are among most recently introduced meta-heuristics. This study aims at adapting artificial bee colony as an alternative and efficient optimization strategy for solving RCPSP and investigating its performance on the RCPSP. To evaluate the artificial bee colony, its performance is investigated against other meta-heuristics for solving case studies in the PSPLIB library. Simulation results show that the artificial bee colony presents an efficient way for solving resource constrained project scheduling problem.

This study investigates the association between firm characteristics, corporate governance attributes and the level of corporate disclosure of listed firms in India. The research paper has been based on a sample of 60 firms listed in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) / National Stock Exchange (NSE) during the study period from 2000-01 to 2009-10. The study has used the Standard & Poor (2008) model for measuring the level of corporate disclosure. To examine the association between explanatory variables and the level of corporate disclosure, multiple regression model has been used. The results suggest a positive relationship between board size, ratio of audit committee members to total board members, family control, CEO duality, firm size, profitability, liquidity and the extent of corporate disclosure. However, the degree of corporate disclosure is negatively related to board composition, leverage and age of the firm.

During the past few years, electronic marketing has gained significant portion of market share in the world. People become familiar with various products and services through the magic of internet and they could make their purchase with an ease of a click of a button. This paper presents an investigation on important factors influencing e-marketing in banking industry in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 19 questions, distributes it among 250 Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number of questions are reduced to 16. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.90 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.939 and 2938, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived two factors including environmental factors as well as information technology.

A new and simple method for the preconcentration and spectrophotometric determination of trace amounts of nickel was developed by cloud point extraction (CPE). In the proposed work, dimethylglyoxime (DMG) was used as the chelating agent and Triton X-114 was selected as a non-ionic surfactant for CPE. The parameters affecting the cloud point extraction including the pH of sample solution, concentration of the chelating agent and surfactant, equilibration temperature and time were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the calibration graph was linear in the range of 10-150 ng mL-1 with a detection limit of 4 ng mL-1. The relative standard deviation for 9 replicates of 100 ng mL-1 Ni(II) was 1.04%. The interference effect of some anions and cations was studied. The method was applied to the determination of Ni(II) in water samples with satisfactory results.