Iranian Journal of Management Studies
Volume:13 Issue: 2, Spring 2020

Competition in the service industry is intense. To deliver value-added services, more companies are focusing on consumers as a powerful means of establishing firm performance through dialog, participation, and engagement. However, scant research has been conducted to examine whether customer value co-creation can boost brand equity, particularly among SMEs. To address these shortcomings in the literature, this paper investigates the impact of customer value co-creation on brand equity among SME consumers of service industries. A theoretical model is developed and tested using survey data from 548 customers in Malaysia.  Structural equation modeling (SEM) is employed to simultaneously test the hypothesized relationships. The results demonstrate a positive relationship between information seeking, responsible behavior, personal interaction, advocacy, tolerance and brand equity. This study contributes to the development of knowledge regarding the transfer of the concept of customer value co-creation to an SME service context.

Risk identification, impact assessment, and response planning constitute three building blocks of project risk management. Correspondingly, three types of interactions could be envisioned between risks, between impacts of several risks on a portfolio component, and between several responses. While the interdependency of risks is a well-recognized issue, the other two types of interactions remain unacknowledged in the risk response planning literature. This research suggests a Bayesian belief network for modeling portfolio risks, their impacts, and responses. There are three kinds of nodes in this network: nodes representing portfolio risks, nodes corresponding to risk impacts on each objective of each portfolio component, and nodes showing response actions. The problem is to decide which responses are to be selected. For this purpose, an optimization model is proposed that minimizes the sum of both residual risk effects on portfolio component objectives and response implementation costs. Subsequently, a genetic algorithm is introduced to solve the model. A simple portfolio instance is also provided to illustrate the proposed model.

This study proposes a novel option-revenue sharing coordination contract framework. In the proposed model, the retailer determines the number of order sales effort. The manufacturer sets the price of products for the wholesale strategy. The investigated supply chain problem analyzes the results of different strategies. In the proposed coordination contract problem, two types of games including retailer-based game and manufacturer-based Stackelberg game are considered. In both cases the retailer adopts the value of order and the sales effort and the manufacturer determines the wholesale price. To assess the performance of the proposed contract, a wholesale and a basic selection contract are considered in the model. To obtain the Nash equilibrium in the retailer-based state of the proposed option-revenue sharing coordination contract problem, a hybrid algorithm consisting of a heuristic and a genetic algorithm is proposed by considering the computational complexities of the proposed model. A numerical comparison between the proposed contract and other cases demonstrates that the option-revenue sharing contract significantly dominates the basic option and the wholesale price contract. Finally, we implemented some numerical experiments on the critical parameters of the contract. Based on the results, increasing the price-dependency of demand results in less number of products ordered by the retailer.

Productivity growth and efficiency improvements are the major sources of economic development. Pure efficiency, scale efficiency, and technology are basic factors, and rules and regulations and balance are recently known factors affecting the productivity growth. This paper focuses on the effect of manpower ethics and physical space facilities of bank branches as two factors affecting the Malmquist productivity index in the bank branches evaluation. The proposed model uses assurance region weight restrictions to increase discrimination power of basic data envelopment analysis models for the constant return to scale technologies. The validity of the proposed model and the extended Malmquist index is confirmed with an empirical case study of 74 branches of aspecializedbank in thehousing sector of Iran in two time periods of 2017 and 2018. The results for both traditional and extended indicesand the effects of manpower ethics and physical space facilities are analyzed.

Empirical support for the assumption that cliques are major determinants of reputational influence derives largely from the frequent finding that organizations which claimed that their cliques’ connections are influential had an increased likelihood of becoming influential themselves. It is suggested that the strong and consistent connection in cliques is at least partially responsible for the reputational influence factors. It is argued that social network analysis is an appropriate method for studying the use of influence development in the context of networked organizations. The results of the statistical network analysis reveal interesting findings in terms of prominent structural forms and the impact of involvement or embeddedness in the formal network. Consequently, this tells us that firms’ embeddedness in a centralized network structure which is based on formal ties harms the firms’ level of reputational influence.

The present study aims to investigate the effect of ideal self-congruence, brand attachment and some personality factors on the negative behaviors of consumers such as compulsive buying, anti-brand actions, and trash talking. The research population was comprised of customers of four IT service brands including Samsung, HP, Sony, and Apple in Iran. Structural equation modeling approach and PLS software were used to test the research hypotheses. The results indicated that ideal self-congruence had a significant positive effect on compulsive buying and trash talking. In addition, ideal self-congruence influenced the negative behaviors of consumers toward the brand through brand attachment. Neuroticism had a significant positive effect on compulsive buying and trash talking. However, conscientiousness only influenced trash talking and did not have any significant effect on compulsive buying. The results of this study show the negative behaviors toward brand. The recognition of negative aspects of the relationship between consumers and brands will help practitioners such as marketing managers with appropriate policy making of brand impression based on the characteristics of the target population. This paper has three key contributions. Since brand is one of the most important social factors, the evaluation of its effects on consumers has been considered by many researchers in recent years. However, studying the effects of branding on the negative behaviors of consumers is an under-researched issue. Studying the effect of neuroticism and conscientiousness as two personality characteristics on the negative behaviors toward brands is another neglected area.  The third contribution is evaluating the research model in an Eastern culture with specific characteristics and preferences of consumers which make their behaviors different from customers of other cultures such as European or American consumers.

This study contributes to the literature on supply chain coordination by coordinating the research and development (R&D) effort, retail price, and inventory decisions. It investigates a real case in the home appliance industry. The main purpose of this study is to examine the optimal values of R&D effort, pricing, and inventory decisions under decentralized and centralized structures. Then, a delay in payment contract is proposed under coordinated structure to simultaneously coordinate all decisions. Moreover, to share the extra profit obtained from the coordinated model between both parties, a profit allocation strategy is proposed. The findings reveal that the coordinated model not only enhances the green supply chain (GSC) profitability in comparison with the decentralized structure but also enhances the profits of all members. Further, the proposed contract improves the GSC performance from both environmental and economic viewpoints.