Sharif Digital Repository

Designing the structure of organization is one of the most important issues confronting all managers, especially those in large corporations. Structure design process consists of making several trade-offs about parameters that are affected with various contingency factors. This leads manages to confusion so some of them have no plans for progressing this process. Referring to organization theory and design, one sees a large number of models of organizational structure design. But there is not any means to compare them with each other. In this research, next the introduction of a conceptual feed-back model of organizational structure design process, three well-known processes in the last... 

Banks and financial services typically focus on geographic, demographic, socio-economic, and psychological characteristics to segment the market, in spite of the fact that these are not efficient predictors of future buying behavior of customers. In the present study, benefit segmentation has been used to group retail banking customers in relation to their particular attitudes and behavior. In particular, the identification and measurement of the two major dimensions of service quality, process (how the service is delivered) and outcome (what is delivered) have been investigated to better understand of what constitutes service quality from the customer’s viewpoint. In order to derive... 

In this research, effective factors on corporate venturing are identified. These factors are categorized in three main groups including “corporate venturing objectives”, “Parent factors” and “Venture factores”. After examining the framework and decision making boundaries, the developed model identifies different corporate venturing types and in the next stage, these types are clusterd and labled. Specifically, this research makes a difference between two phases of “initating” the ventures and “designing” them. Based on the logic that different types of ventures need different types of designing and structuring, influencing parameters on designing corporate ventures are identified as a... 

Networked businesses refer to those businesses which establish flow of value between their customers through platforms. Networks create value by preparing the access of customers to each other and facilitating the interactions between them. Today more than 60% of fortune100 companies capture revenue through a network concept. The most important issue which makes networked businesses different from traditional businesses is a phenomenon named Network Effects. Network Effects is the relationship exists between the value of a network to its users and the number of users connected to the network. In this research reviewing literature and case studies of networked business area, we have found... 

Today, the importance of growth and its relation with the survival of the organization is well-known by all managers. However, path selection in this area seems extremely vague and difficult. The present theoretical research, conducted to help further clarify growth dimension characteristics, aims at considering possible growth paths for firms as well as examining required capabilities for each path. In this research, firm growth was studied from three different angles: value chain, product system complexity and the market. A relatively comprehensive categorization was made of organizational capabilities namely technological, managerial and networking and it was examined within dynamic and... 

Consumers Communicate with each other to share information and feelings about products and brands. One important area to study personal influence in contemporary environment is online personal influence or electronic word of mouth. This study develops and tests consumers' motivations to participate in eWoM communication in online discussion forums. The main reason to choose Online forums is the huge number of eWoM discussions which occur in them. The main goal of this study is developing an aggregate framework for consumers' motives for opinion giving and seeking in online forums.To accomplish this goal we studied a comprehensive literature review, identified all motivations for WoM and... 

Networked business is a kind of businesses, relatively new and very complex, worthy of more analysis and study. From all types of networked businesses, “Platform based” ones are subject of this study. To solve “the problem of networked business”, in this study we try to develop a conceptual framework, using different disciplines especially:
- Business model studies
- Network science and social network studies
- Economic and strategic studies of platforms
Besides some new business concepts defined and theorized in this study, reader will find the conceptual architecture, applicable to the general of the business  

Increasing of competency, urged organizations to perform their maximum endeavor for establishing effective communication with customers. Customers' demand for optional production along with minimum cost and time, has become a principle for many organizations. Organizations' general tendency for using project management methods in their businesses is increasing day by day and this matter necessitates research in various aspects of project management processes. Furthermore; outsourcing of activities and tendency to adopt contract methods, has persuaded organizations to use project management. For project-focused organizations, identification of daily changes in business theme and customer... 

One of the most important concerns of top management is continuous growth in revenue and profit specially in corporate with maturing core businesses. So managers invest vastly in growth opportunities but most of them lead to failure. One of the reasons can be the mistakes in growth opportunity identification. Growth opportunity Identifications needs a clear understanding of different dimensions in opportunities. In this research, a conceptual framework named “Reference Conceptual Framework for growth opportunity Identification” has been presented which includes four different dimensions: 1) “Where” including the distance of opportunity from core business and its impact on the core 2) “Which”... 

Human beings have always been tried to make new, innovative things to benefit from. The new things have been improved from a wheel to a smart car and the benefits have been improved from survival to survival plus fitness, happiness, sense of belonging, security and etc. Companies which have been following the human nature, and thinking of new, innovative products and consumers’ benefits cohesively, could gain competitive advantages. But the process of new product development has always been costly and due to the high failure rate it is risky. One of the main challenges in NPD projects is understanding consumer's behavior. Most companies try to identify consumer's needs by knowledge... 

Knowing the shape and type of the breakdown of a system or the system components, for a maintenance manager or maintenance engineer is significantly important. It is also important that the existing information concerning the system performance predict and prevent a sudden failure to be probably taken place. Maintenance has gained in importance as a support function for ensuring equipment availability, quality products, on-time deliveries, and plant safety. Cost effectiveness and accuracy are two basic criteria for good maintenance. Many studies in the area of equipment maintenance, replacement, and reliability require that the failure characteristic of a component to be estimated from... 

Undoubtedly, reducing the organization's costs in today's world economy situation is a requisite for the survival of the organization. In order to continue their economic life, organizations must make their movements more effective by reducing costs and increasing agility and productivity. Various methods have been proposed to reduce costs, but before any measurements, identification of the reducible factors is very necessary.
Improving processes in an organization is considered as one of the best ways to reduce costs and increase profitability. In this research, the goal is to provide a model for reducing costs using process attitude so that the associated costs of the organization can... 

Seasonal Products are a group of products with a limited life time. If seasonal products are not sold during a specified time, they have to be sold at a salvage price which is close to zero. Although one can find many studies in the literature regarding pricing of this type of products in order to maximize the profit, none of them have considered the simultaneous effect of both advertising and pricing. The objective of this paper is to introduce an integrated model of dynamic pricing and advertising for seasonal products. The advertisement is classified into two main categories; to advertise a specific type of product and to advertise the brand of the company. To obtain the mentioned goal,... 

In this thesis, an approach is developed to obtain an optimal pricing policy for chartered flights. In order to do so, a model within the framework of dynamic programming is presented and its main structure is also analyzed. Since in real world cases the dimension of this model happens to be very large, a solution method is developed by “Q Learning” technique. This is an appropriate approach in approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning. Analysis is carried out under two different assumptions regarding demand, namely “linear-deterministic” and probabilistic demand for transition probabilities. An exact solution for deterministic demand case is developed. Furthermore, for...