Sharif Digital Repository

Due to violent and ferocious competition and global changes of new trends, directions and new ways of doing business, financial institutions grapple with new challenges and opportunities in today business. The advancement in technology, information and communication has forced banks and financial institutions into hard competition. In this new era technology, people as the customer are the elements on which the banks are concentrating them to manage customer relationship. In this complicated situation, Electronic customer relationship management (E-CRM) is seen applicatory and beneficial solution to improve customers‟ service, develop a profitable and long term relationship and retain... 

Restructuring energy systems for increasing the competence and improving the efficiency has been regarded by energy policy makers. Also, the emerging of new technologies and also the district generation has increased the competence in energy industry. Planning and exploiting the energy system in a restructured environment, has basic differences with integrated systems. Models that can assess the behavior of independent players are needed to assess energy systems in a restructured space.The goal of the present study is to present a model to optimally develop the energy system in a restructured environment. The concept of energy hub was applied to model multicarrier systems. Three steps were... 

The issue of loss allocation is one of the most important issues that has long been considered in electricity networks, including distribution and transmission. With changes in distribution networks over the years and the penetration of distributed energy sources, the allocation of losses has become more of a challenge than ever before. Hence, there is a need for a loss allocation algorithm that can be implemented in any network and with any topology. In this dissertation, a new, simple and at the same time efficient algorithm for allocating real losses in all networks (distribution - transmission) and with any structure (radial - circular) is presented. This algorithm first tracks the... 

This research is about raffles held by firms. Nowadays raffles are used by some firms as a mean to attract more customers and obtain more profit to the extent that they compete on their prize instead of their price. In order to investigate this phenomenon, we introduce a model based on spatial competition. This model explains the reason firms have incentive to offer raffles when consumer is risk neutral. According to this model we conclude competing on prize reduces consumers’ surplus considerably. Because of this, the intervention of policy maker can prevent the reduction in consumers’ surplus  

In this research, we tried to investigate the effect of a firm’s IPO on the operational performance of its rivals. We used a dynamic structural oligopoly model to distinguish between hypotheses that can explain the industry evolution after the initial public offering, to estimate the value of rival firms’ post-IPO. The results showed that rival firms suffered losses in most IPO events and these losses were caused by industry trends. However, in some IPOs, the initial impact of an IPO on rival firms was through changing production technologies or reducing product homogenization, which increased their profitability. A much smaller percentage of observations also found evidence of competitive... 

The impact of ownership concentration on competitive conditions and profitability of industries has been studied and analyzed for decades. By using the Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index, a range for the level of concentration in the industry has been determined, and some countries implement anti-trust laws based on this range. The new literature that has been discussed recently is the concentration of the market directly and through the common ownership of corporations by large shareholders. In the sense that two or more apparently independent companies may have a common owner who practically regulates their behavior as a company. The structure of ownership in Iran is complex and... 

In this work, the dynamic competition between firms providing internet services is studied. The framework is Markov equilibrium whereby structural parameters are obtained using two-step estimations, allowing for analyzing the situation in case of subsidies for service upgrade. The results show that such subsidy has little effect on the number of firms while increasing the number of fast firms  

This thesis’s problem is how a manufacturer should select distribution channels and how to interact with the selected ones. The acquired model, analyzes strategies of the manufacturer regarding selecting distribution channels and coordinating contracts for a triple-channel supply chain environment. The aforementioned channels are physical, electronical, and direct. It is assumed that manufacturer is the Stackelberg leader and the physical channel is the electronical’s follower. Four scenarios are introduced to analyze players’ interactions through contracts. Horizontal competition with Stackelberg game is present in first three scenarios. The forth scenario obtains the maximum total profit... 

Financial distress can propagate through different channels such as bank run, deposit interbank market,networks and asset prices. In this paper, with the assumption of deposit insurance, no linkages between banks, no deposit interbank market and fixed asset prices, we show that asset-side shocks might propagate through both loan interbank market and deposit market. However, when there is aggregate liquidity surplus in the banking system, loan interbank market results in the first best allocation. In contrast, aggregate liquidity shortage does not result in optimum allocation. In the presence of deposit and loan interbank market, not only shocks propagate but also they are magnified with the... 

This thesis aim to the study of the effect of bank’s branching decisions on deposit market. Using panel data banks from Iran, we study effect of branching on market share and market size. In theoretical part, we assume that banks maximize discounted flow of the profits. We also assume that the banks take into account the reaction from rival banks in setting number of branches. Banks are assumed to expect the rival banks react by a lag of one period. In empirical part, in order to distinguish between aggregate market size effect and market share effect, we rewrite quantity of deposit in banks as the product of aggregate deposit and market share. We specify deposit market share function with... 

Concentration brings a twofold result to the market. From one side, it reduces the competition and then the number of varieties in the market, which discourages consumption; from another side, however, it reduces the price of goods due to increasing returns to scale and so encourages consumption. This controversial role of concentration raises the question that which degree of concentration might be, say, optimum for the market. Based on the Krugman approach, this study makes a relation between the number of firms, export volume, marginal and average fixed cost of production. We show that when number of firms reduces in the market, export volume could increase because of a reduction in... 

Producer-level data for Iranian manufacturing firms shows a large amount of dispersion and concentration in producer level sectoral shares, as well as a very strong relashionship between sectoral shares and markups. We Study the pro-competitive gain from trade in the Iran’s manufacturing sector. Domestic firms in Iranian manufacturing sector are protected via tarfiff and non-tariff barriers enforced by the government. In many sections of manufacturing sector, domestic firms feel little competition and charge high markups. The market power of domestic firms could be reduced by the reduction of tariff rate and increase in import share. As a result of foreign competition pressure, they would be... 

Continuous-time Stochastic Game (CTSG) can be seen as a proper model to analyze probabilistic, nondeterministic, and competitive behaviors as found in Stochastic Multi-Player Game (SMG). The difference is that in an SMG, the system under design is analyzed in the discrete-time setting. In comparison, in a CTSG, the system transitions occur in the continuous-time setting with exponentially distributed delays. This thesis focuses on the model checking of CTSGs with bounded transition rates. We present a uniformization-based algorithm to approximate the optimal time-bounded reachability probabilities with an arbitrary error bound. To illustrate the strength points of our algorithm, we compare... 

In this study, we consider the fair division problem. In this problem, a heterogeneous resource must be fairly divided among a set of agents with different preferences.The resource can be either a divisible good (i.e., time, land), or a set of indivisible goods. When the resource is a single divisible good, the problem is commonly known as cake cutting. To measure fairness, several notions are defined, i.e., envy-freeness, proportionality, equability, maximin-share. In this thesis, we first give a formal definition of these notions. Next, we present our results for envy-freeness and maximin-share.First, we prove the existence of an allocation that guarantees each agent a factor 3/4 of his... 

Abstract The problem of competetive facility location can be defined as follows: There are a number of customers in the form of points in space, and two players arrange a number of facilities in the form of points in space, given some limitations, respectively. Each customer’s connection to each facility has a cost for the customer and an advantage for the facility, and each customer wants to be connected to at most one of the facilities which has the lowest cost for him. The goal is to find the strategy of placing the facilities and determining the cost which the facility receives from the customer, in such a way that the player’s profit is maximised.In this thesis, we first sought to... 

In this research, path planning in unknown environment is considered. It is assumed that the robot’s sensors are the only tools to collect information from the scene. Volume of the information gathered from the environment depends on the capability of the sensor. So, a detour from the optimal path is unavoidable. In this research, the basic robot is equipped with a minimal sensing system that only detects the iscontinuities in depth information (gaps). We present some online search strategies that guide such a robot to navigate unknown streets from a start point s to reach a target point t. Then, we empower the robot by adding a compass to patrol more general classes of polygons. We present... 

In general, modeling errors cause incompatibility between experimental results and the numerical finite element model. To address this issue, the finite element model is being updated to identify the actual dynamic properties of the structure, to evaluate and estimate possible defects of structure, and finally to adapt the behavior of the numerical model and the real structure. As an optimization problem, unknown parameters of the identification model and parameters with uncertainty are being modified. Definition of an appropriate objective function, specifying up-to-date parameters and determining an efficient optimization method are the three main steps of a model-updating problem. On the... 

Endurance Time (ET) method is a dynamic analysis in which structures are subjected to intensifying acceleration time histories. These excitations are also called Endurance Time Excitation Functions (ETEF). The reliability and accuracy of the ET method heavily depends on the accuracy of ETEFs. ETEFs are generated so that ETEFs dynamic characteristics must be consistent with dynamic characteristics of real ground motions. Since the number of ETEFs equations are considerably more than variables noninear optimization is used to generate ETEFs. In order to improve the accuracy of ETEFs two approaches can be used. First, modifying the objective function equations by considering more dynamic... 

Atherosclerosis is one of the most important factors for mortality and morbidity in the world. Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) is applied for treatment of this disease which in this surgery, the patient vessels, such as internal thoracic artery and saphenous vein, are harvested and grafted to the coronary arteries. The graft success and its performance in short and long-term are depended on the much factors e.g. the severity of stenosis in the coronary artery. It should be noted that the low level of stenosis in the coronary artery causes the creation of undesirable phenomenon of competitive flow in the grafts after the surgery which this phenomenon has been reported as a cause of graft... 

In recent years, great attention has been devoted to the design of artificial arms. The most crucial problem in such a design is the trajectory of movement. In this paper, a seven degree of freedom arm is modeled and simulated. Also, the optimization method named “Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm” has been modified and better performance of the new version is presented. Energy optimization is performed based on trajectory of the arm with angular velocity, angular acceleration and joint angles using modified imperialistic competitive algorithm (ICA). Considering ICA as a fast optimization algorithm, it would be reasonable to use this algorithm for robotic purposes for online answering. The...