Sharif Digital Repository

The present research investigates the conjunction of two areas of pricing and negotiation techniques to find a relationship between price and other key factors such as quality, quantity, time, etc. and observe the overall effect of these factors on how to design and implement negotiations over price in B2B environment. The research presents a model to describe the process of negotiation and applies quantitative methods to rank negotiable scenarios. This set of scenarios, then is sorted in a triangular model of negotiation strategy and is used as a roadmap for negotiation. Furthermore, researcher evaluates effective tactics and their implementation to drive negotiation sessions based on... 

Proficient management of Supply Chain (SC) necessitates an efficient evaluation of SC performance. This highlights cardinal role of performance measurement in management of SC. However, SC has multidisciplinary nature in its wide spectrum of activities including planning, control and coordination of intra- and inter-firm players from upstream suppliers to downstream customers. As such, performance measurement of SC is a quite complex task and an effective assessment can significantly help enterprises in achieving their business goals. Objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive structural framework to facilitate assessment of various aspects contributing on SC performance.... 

Outsourcing is currently a challenging issue in the auto industry. On one hand, outsourcing has be-come a competitive imperative for automakers due to its significant benefits. On the other hand, it involves many aspects of risks that could potentially hurt core competencies of a firm. As such, in the auto industry, it is highly critical to make optimal outsourcing decisions for which an integrated framework offering a holistic view seems quite necessary. In this thesis, based on four fundamental research questions of “Who?”, “What?”, “Whom?” and “How?”, an integrated framework for outsourcing in the auto industry is developed in order to identify effective outsourcing factors and associated... 

Today service sector is an important part of economy in many countries and it accounts for a great portion of GDP in developed countries. The importance of the service sector has led to an expansion in research worldwide on services. Service has some unique specifications that make it different from product and research in this field is more challenging than production field. Pricing is one of the great challenges in service sector. Due to its intangibility and perishability, managing and pricing of service is complicated and ervice firms consistently seek for method and approaches to better manage their demand, capacity and prices. Advance sale is an effective approach which is commonly... 

The importance of New Product Development (NPD) projects has been realized more and more in recent years. Among different decisions to be made in NPD process, one of the most critical decisions is about the best time to launch new product(s). Due to existence of many internal and external influential factors, determining the optimal launch time is often too complicated and it is quite hard to systematically analyze it. Despite risky nature of NPD, risk considerations in determining the optimal launch time have not been addressed in literature due to the mentioned complexity. In this research, we developed a model that takes in to account risk considerations while systematically determining... 

Innovative small tech companies are required to often have cooperation with large companies in order to scale-up and commercialize their products. Such cooperation is referred as “Technological Cooperation” since it relies on development and commercialization of technology. In this research, as a multiple-case study in the arena of nanotechnology, five cases of technological cooperation are analyzed and key successful factors are identified. In this endeavor, 15 comprehensive interviews were conducted with both small tech companies and technology applicant companies, including experts of Nanotechnology Innovative Council (INIC) – playing the role of a mediator. Due to lack of a comprehensive... 

With the growth and success of applications like Uber using the sharing economy concept in order to create value, many firms try to run businesses with similar ideas. Assisting such businesses to be created and grew, we present an analysis of Uber’s operation in this thesis. In addition, factors affecting supply and demand function for travel-matching applications are perceived with Tap30’s dataset and the mismatch between these functions in some areas and times is recognized as Tap30’s current problem. To address this problem, a mechanism is designed to adjust supply function with the demand in order to increase the number of customer-driver matching in the system. To design a mechanism, a... 

Marketing channels are a set of organizations which because of having access to target market and communication with consumers play an effective role in consumer buying process and offering goods and services.The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate consumer buying process in online stores, as a marketing channel. In order to meet the objective and investigate customer’s attitude, the focus is on brand image whose three main components are: store brand image, product brand image, and product specifications. The three components collectively influence customer purchase intention. To have a holistic understanding of purchase process, the value of transaction is defined as a mediator... 

Nowadays, companies trade with each other to prosper, and the role of trading in the growth of businesses is undeniable. Many of them procure raw materials from their suppliers or sell their products to retailers. A contract is the first step to form such interaction. In a contract, each company has specific purposes which are ambiguous at the time of signing a contract. These objects and expectations are determined at the beginning of a contract, whereas both parties of a contract are uncertain about the future circumstances. In many cases, the future conditions cause one party of a contract breaches and terminates it. One of the most common reasons for breaching is the emergence of a new...