Evaluation of service quality by using fuzzy MCDM: A case study in Iranian health-care centers

Service quality plays an important role in health care systems since hospitals are responsible for people's lives. This study presents an effective approach for evaluating and comparing service qualities of four hospitals. Service quality consists of different attributes and many of them are intangible and difficult to measure. Therefore, we propose a fuzzy method to resolve the ambiguity of the concepts, which are associated with human judgments. SERVQUAL model is used to evaluate the respondents' judgments of service quality and multi attribute decision making approach is implemented for the comparison among hospitals. The paper use analytical hierarchy process (AHP) for obtaining criteria weight and TOPSIS for ranking the cases

A framework to select commercial bank partner using fuzzy BSC-DEA method

One of the primary concerns of many corporate organizations is to assess the weakness and strength of their future partners in an attempt to reduce all potential risks involved with them. In this paper, we present a BSC-DEA based model to indentify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a firm. The proposed model of this paper assumes there are various uncertainties associated with all input/output parameters and uses fuzzy numbers to handle the uncertainties. We also consider a real-world case study of banking industry where four major banks are possible candidates of a partnership and implement the proposed model of this paper for this case study. The results of this study reveal some of the issues such as weakness of electronic banking, services and resource allocation as part of their infrastructure problems

A Model to Investigate the Effect of Work Ethic Culture on Dynamics of Rework in Management of Projects

The present study aims to investigate the effect of work ethic culture on rework in construction projects through a review of literature, surveys, and interviews with project managers. The main research question is what mechanisms can project manager use to balance the costs of personnel training, financial and language incentives, and implementation costs to finish the project with more profit and less rework. In this regard, modelling and data analysis is done using System Dynamics methodology. The results show that by considering work ethic, rework in the project is reduced from 46 % to 39 %. However, the project has been completed with 10 % lower cost and 26 % lower variance. Integrating the issue of rework with the culture of work ethic in the field of project management by at least one exogenous parameter has been studied, while in this study qualitative parameters have been converted to quantitative parameters using fuzzy inference system. The change in management approach to the issue of work ethics and the formulation of human resource strategies of large projects by human resource managers is one of the applications of this study

Comparing the Expectations of Financial Reporting Preparers and Users of Integrated Financial Reporting

Integrated financial reporting provides crucial information about an organization's strategy, direction, performance, and future outlook encompassing business, social, and environmental performance within its operational context. It also promotes a coherent and effective approach to corporate reporting. This research aims to compare the expectations of integrated financial reporting producers and users. Data analysis using SPSS software and statistical tests, including "Kolmogrove-smirnov", "Yoman-whitney" and "Friedman" has shown significant differences between the opinions of users and financial report preparers regarding report components, innovative practices, targeted investments, rewards and benefits, risk management, governance structure, and balanced scorecard. However, the comparison of expectations has shown no significant difference between the expectations of report providers and users regarding providing reports on mutual communication, compliance with legal and ethical standards, user’s engagement, and the reporting of financial status and sustainability of financial services.IntroductionAn integrated report should provide insight into the nature and quality of an organization's relationships with its key stakeholders. According to the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), one of the guiding principles which underpin the preparation of integrated reports is the formation of effective stakeholder relationships. However, several challenges are also identified. These challenges include difficulties in determining what information is material and should, therefore, be included in an integrated report. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the quality and utility of integrated reporting by exploring the possibility that a perception gap has emerged, which affects the perceived relevance of integrated reporting. this paper makes an important contribution to the prior literature on integrated reporting by introducing the idea of a perception gap and offering one of the initial accounts of stakeholders’ perspectives on companies’ integrated reports. This will shed light on where companies can improve their integrated reports and inform the development of additional guidance by standard-setters and regulators.MethodologyThe study's statistical population comprises two groups: report producers and users. This includes auditors from the audit organizations and audit institutions, members of the Society of Official Accountants of Iran, as well as board directors and managers of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the year 2022. The sampling method employed in this research is available sampling. This research is classified as a descriptive-survey study with an applied approach. The identified themes are incorporated into a Likert scale questionnaire. Lastly, the collected data were analyzed using SPSS software and relevant statistical tests.FindingsBased on the findings, there is a gap between auditors' and users' perspectives in terms of reporting and identifying innovative perspectives, targeted investments, rewards and benefits, risk management, governance structure, and balanced scorecard. Conversely, no significant gap is anticipated between the perspectives of producers and users in terms of mutual communication, compliance with legal and ethical standards, streamlining financial operations, user communication, as well as reporting financial status and corporate sustainability.Conclusion and discussionIn line with the examination of expectations between providers and stakeholders concerning the disclosure of integrated reporting components, the results of hypothesis testing indicate that, except for reporting and identifying innovative perspectives, targeted investments, rewards and benefits, risk management, governance structure, and balanced evaluation card, there is no significant expectation gap between beneficiaries and providers. In fact, the results indicate that users of integrated reports seek additional information on matters such as the competence and performance of those responsible for governance and how management has handled risk to ensure financial sustainability and prevent financial crises. They prioritize these aspects over the disclosure of information about social and environmental issues.Finally, the results of this study highlight several areas for future research. It would be valuable to investigate whether a perception gap exists in other industries and to identify the factors contributing to changes in the perception gap. More work also needs to be done to understand the determinants of the perception gap. This paper is based on the assumption that user sophistication affects the perceived importance of disclosures found in integrated reports. Cultural variables, the nature of the corporate governance system and the extent to which companies are able to manage perceptions are additional variables which need to be taken into account in order to define the dimensions of the perception gap in an integrated reporting context more accurately and inform policymakers and standard setters

Predicting the Price of Bitcoin Using Hybrid ARIMA and Deep Learning

Recently, Bitcoin as the most popular cryptocurrency, has attracted the attention of many investors and economic actors. The cryptocurrency market has experienced a sharp fluctuation, and one of the challenges is to predict future prices. Undoubtedly, creating methods to predict the price of bitcoin is very exciting and has a huge impact on determining the profit and loss from its trading in the future. In this study, in order to predict the price of Bitcoin, a combination of the ARIMA model and three types of deep neural networks including RNN, LSTM, and GRU have been used. The main purpose of this study is to determine the effect of deep learning models on the performance of predicting the future price of Bitcoin. In the proposed model, first, the linear components in the data set are separated using ARIMA and the resulting residues are transferred separately to each of the neural networks. The results show that the ARIMA-GRU model has better results for RMSE and MAPE criteria than other models. Combined models also perform better than the traditional ARIMA model in forecasting

Measuring hospital service quality and its influence on patient satisfaction: An empirical study using structural equation modeling

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 strategy of Protection of vital facilities in the presence of attacks with varying severity levels

Today, vital infrastructure of security systems, are at risk of deliberate attacks and to provide the necessary preparations and an appropriate response to the attacks, strengthening the vital infrastructure is considered. In this paper, a special type of strengthening the vital infrastructure is discussed that in which before they are constructed, there would be planning about strengthening them. The case is formulated as a two-level planning that in high level, the defender is looking for minimizing the total cost, considering which facilities are built, and each facility, in terms of pre-attack, services which costumer and in terms of post-attack, how many defenders assigned to each facility. While at a low level, (the attacker) is looking for imposing the maximum cost to the system considering which facility and at what level of severity, is attacked. To resolve the case, a meta-heuristic ways based on simulated annealing method suggested and by solving an example and compare its results with the results of the exact solution, the effectiveness of the method has been tested