Building a competitive brand is a key success specially in banking industry. This paper presents a study to investigate important factors influencing brand loyalty among special customers in one of biggest Iranian banks in Iran. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 249 regular customers who are special customers in various banks in city of Tehran, Iran. The study uses structural equation modeling to find important factors and they are ranked using TOPSIS method. In our study, Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.815 and there are eight influencing factors including flexibility in offering various services, building good relationship with customers, technology and processes, customers’ experiences, brand identity in continuous advertisement, organization size, customer perception on reputation of brand and customers’ tendency to build better brand loyalty. In our survey, flexibility in offering various services received the highest rank followed by building good relationship with customers.

This paper measures the likelihood of bankruptcy based on some financial ratios such as debt ratio, current ratio, sales to total assets, etc. using logistic regression and classification and regression tree techniques (CART). The proposed study gathers the information of 36 bankrupted firms and 36 non-bankrupted firms based on Tobin Q ratio. The study gathers the necessary information over the period 2005-2011. The preliminary results indicate that both methods have the capability to predict bankruptcy but with different accuracy. The likelihood of bankruptcy based on CART method were 97.2, 97.5 and 86.1 in the event of bankruptcy, one year before and two years prior to bankruptcy, respectively. These figures were changes to 98.6, 94.4 and 84.7 based on logistic method.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure different dimensions of hospital service quality (HSQ) by gap analysis and patient satisfaction (PS). It also attempts to measure patients’ satisfaction with three dimensions extracted from exploratory factor analysis (EFA) by Principle component analysis method and conformity factor analysis (CFA). In addition, the study analyzes relationship between HSQ and PS in the context of Iranian hospital services, using structural equation modeling (SEM) from patients’ perspectives. The maximum gap observed in “responsiveness” and the minimum one in “assurance”. In addition, patients had the most satisfaction in “trust” with the mean of 3.83 followed by “General Satisfaction” with the mean of 3.68 and they had the least satisfaction in “Acceptance” with the mean of 3.53. Two measurement models were used for measuring hospital service quality and patient satisfaction and one structural model, which showed the relationship between them. The result of this study showed that there was a positive and significant impact from hospital service quality on patient satisfaction (0.463). In addition, there was a positive and significant relationship between hospital service quality and five dimensions. Furthermore, it was shown that patient satisfaction and three dimensions (General Satisfaction, Trust, and Acceptance) were associated with each other, significantly and positively. At last management strategies and practical suggestions were presented to hospital.

The increase competitions as well as technological advancements have created motivation among business owners to look for more innovative ideas from outside their organizations. Many enterprises collaborate with other organizations to empower themselves through innovative ideas. These kinds of collaborations can be observed as a concept called Regional Innovation System. These collaborations include inter-firm collaborations, research organizations, intermediary institutions and governmental agencies. The primary objective of this paper is to evaluate relationships between Collaborative Networks and Innovation in information technology business units located in province of Tehran, Iran. The research method utilized for the present study is descriptive-correlation. To evaluate the relationships between independent and dependent variables, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is used. The results confirm the previous findings regarding the relationship between Collaborative Networks and Innovation. Among various dimensions of Collaboration, Collaboration with governmental agencies had a very small impact on the relationship between collaboration networks and innovation. In addition, the results show that in addition to affecting product innovation and process innovation, collaboration networks also affected management innovation.

The present study investigates the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty in one of Iranian banks in province of Golestan, Iran named Bank Melli Iran. The population of the study consists of all customers of this branch. Using Kersity-Morgan table and simple random sampling, a number of 384 customers were selected as the participants of the study. The method of research is descriptive-correlation with a survey design. SERVQUAL scale and a researcher-made questionnaire were used to examine service quality and customer loyalty, respectively. Pearson correlation formula was run to analyze the data. The results showed a significant relationship between different aspects of service quality and customer loyalty in this particular branch of bank.

Hotel industry plays important role on developing tourism industry and having better services in this industry always help increase market share. The proposed study of this paper considers the effects of four variables including collaboration with staff, collaboration with customers, collaboration with partners and business owners and finally mechanism of integration of knowledge on innovation on service. The population of this survey includes 259 hotels where we send our questionnaire to 179 and manage to collect 170 ones. Cronbach alpha for four variables including collaboration with staff, collaboration with customers, collaboration with partners and business owners and finally mechanism of integration of knowledge were calculated as 0.78, 0.865, 0.743 and 0.890, respectively. The proposed study uses structural equation modeling to study the relationship between independent variables and dependent variable and the effects of four variables are confirmed when the level of significance is five percent.

Information asymmetry is a situation in which one party in a transaction has more or superior information compared with another. This often happens in transactions where the seller knows more than the buyer does although the reverse also may happen. Potentially, this could be a harmful circumstance because one party can take advantage of the other party & apos; s lack of knowledge. In this paper, we examine the effect of information asymmetry on earning management. To test the research hypotheses, a sample of 47 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2002-2008 based on panel data was taken. In these models, the presence or absence of effects models (fixed or random) is reviewed and finally the best model is estimated. Inference is based on significant level or p-value, thus likely that any value or significance level of the test is less than 0.05 is rejected at the 95 percent confidence level. The result shows that the information asymmetry has some meaningful effects on earnings management.

Loneliness is one of the primary issues, which harms social activities especially among young people who need to take part in work force, actively. This paper presents an empirical investigation on the effects of timidity and loneliness among female students who attend in one of Islamic Azad University, Shahreza unit. The proposed study selects 60 students out of 400 female students who were living university dormitory. The survey uses Pearson correlation ratio between timidity and loneliness and our survey indicates that the Pearson correlation ratio is equal to r=0.11 with P-value=0.33. Therefore, we can conclude that there is no meaningful relationship between timidity and loneliness when the level of significance is five percent.

Measuring the relative efficiency of banking industry has been one of the most interesting areas of research for the past few years. There are literally various techniques for measuring the relative performance of similar units such as banks including data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative performance of some Iranian banks located in province of Alborz, Iran for two consecutive fiscal years of 2009 and 2010. The proposed study implements stochastic frontier analysis to measure the performance of these banks based on two set of criteria. In the first model, total loans devoted are considered as output and employees, total customers?investment, total fixed assets as well as no-interest deposits are considered as inputs of the model. For the second model, special banks?characteristics such as total economic value of branch, the ratio of fixed assets to total assets, educational backgrounds of employees as well as the level of automation in the system are considered as input parameters of the systems. The results indicate that most bank perform relatively well according to their efficiencies.