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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of brand experience on brand equity dimensions in the perspective of customers (including brand identification, physical quality, staff behavior quality, brand awareness, ideal self-congruence and life style-congruence) on brand satisfaction and loyalty in Iranian banking industry.

The author designed the conceptual model of the research based on the existing relationships between the research variables and the proposed hypotheses. By a questionnaire, the opinion of 288 customers and clients of selected branches of Melli and Tejarat banks were collected in two Provinces, including East and West Azerbaijan Provinces. The research hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

The results of the paper showed that the brand experience directly affected all dimensions of brand equity. Also, the results indicated that except for lifestyle congruence, other dimensions of equity directly affected the customers' brand satisfaction.

This paper is significant, because it addresses the experience relationships and brand equity with the perspective of the customers of banks in an Islamic country, which affects the development of branding literature.

The strategic importance of brand identity management has been emphasized in the brand management literature, but studies that examine brand identity sub-components effects on customer resilience to negative information are very few. In this regard, this study aims to examine the effect of brand distinctiveness and prestige as sub-components of identity on young customers’ loyalty and resilience to negative information through the mediating variable of brand attractiveness in the luxury electronics market.

Using a structured questionnaire, data were collected. Based on a five-point Likert scale were asked of consumers and owners of electronic products (mobile phone, tablet and laptop) to indicate their level of disagreement and agreement with series of statements. After an analytic process, 422 valid questionnaires were obtained. The hypotheses were tested by using structural equation modeling.

The results showed that brand prestige and distinctiveness have direct effect on brand attractiveness, which prestige had more influence than distinctiveness. The results indicated that brand loyalty was strongly affected by direct brand attractiveness, and that the effect of brand attractiveness on the resilience to negative information was not significant. Finally, the study results showed that resilience to negative information is affected by brand loyalty.

This study is significant because it is one of the few studies that examines the effect of brand identity on brand attractiveness and consumers’ extra-role behavior, which results in the development of branding literature in the field of luxury products.

The purpose of this research is to extract the natural frequencies of a circular plate containing a central hole reinforced with boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) and containing piezoelectric layers.

A unit cell shall be taken into account for the simulation of BNNT's volume fraction. A rectangular micromechanical model is used to obtain the mechanical properties of unit cell of piezoelectric fiber-reinforced composite (PFRC). The three-dimensional (3D) elasticity method is presented to provide the relationship between displacements and stresses. The one-dimensional differential quadrature method (1D-DQM) and the state-space methodology are combined to create the semi-analytical technique. The state-space approach is utilized to implement an analytical resolution in the thickness direction, and 1D-DQM is used to implement an approximation solution in the radial direction. The composite consists of a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) matrix and BNNTs as reinforcement.

A study on the PFRC is carried, likewise, the coefficients of its properties are obtained using a micro-electromechanical model known as the rectangular model. To implement the DQM, the plate was radially divided into sample points, each with eight state variables. The boundary situation and DQM are used to discretize the state-space equations, and the top and bottom application surface conditions are used to determine the natural frequencies of the plate. The model's convergence is assessed. Additionally, the dimensionless frequency is compared to earlier works and ABAQUS simulation in order to validate the model. Finally, the effects of the thickness, lateral wavenumber, boundary conditions and BNNT volume fraction on the annular plate's free vibration are investigated. The important achievements are that increasing the volume fraction of BNNTs increases the natural frequency.

The micromechanical “XY rectangle” model in PFRC along with the three-dimensional elasticity model is used in this literature to assess how the piezoelectric capabilities of BNNTs affect the free vibration of polymer-based composite annular plates under various boundary conditions.

The main purpose of this study is to decompose the concept of country of origin (COO) and to investigate the influence of country of brand (COB) and country of manufacture (COM) on brand equity formation. Moreover, the secondary aim of this research is to examine the moderating role of product involvement.

To accomplish this, a conceptual framework was designed and relationships between its constructs (COB image, COM image, brand equity dimensions, overall brand equity) were hypothesized. Data were collected from Iranian students who were the owners of selected brands of laptops and mobile phones. All hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) in LISREL.

As a result of exploratory factor analysis, three factors, namely brand loyalty, perceived quality and brand association/awareness were introduced for the brand equity dimensions. Results indicated that unlike COM, COB has a direct and significant effect on brand loyalty and COB positively influences perceived quality and brand awareness or association. Brand loyalty has a positive and direct effect on the overall brand equity. The results also indicate the moderating effect of product involvement on relationships between COB and brand equity dimensions.

This study only investigates in the country of origin of the product. The effect of laptops and mobile phones from a student's point of view were not taken into consideration, which includes other controlled variables (e.g. income, gender) and moderating factors (e.g. product familiarity).

This paper is important in order to identify the effect of brand equity formation from the point of view of young Iranian consumers. Product involvement effect is another important case in this research.

It has been suggested that there is a link between the dietary intake of certain nutrients and the risk of prostate cancer. The aim of this study is to examine the associations between dietary intakes of all nutrients and the risk of prostate cancer in Kermanshah.

This case-control study was conducted in Kermanshah, a province in the west of Iran in November of 2016. The sample consisted of 50 patients with confirmed prostate cancer, and 150 healthy men who matched in age with these cases and did not have any symptoms of prostate disorder were chosen as controls. Dietary intakes were collected by a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire that contained 147 food items and were then analyzed by Nutritionist 4 software.

After adjustment for potential confounding factor, highest tertile compared to lowest tertile of dietary vitamin E intake [odds ratio (OR) = 0.21; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.05-0.89], lycopene intake (OR = 0.11; 95% CI = 0.01-0.86) and magnesium intake (OR = 0.02; 95% CI = 0.01-0.55) had a protective effect on the incidence of prostate cancer. However, there were no associations between dietary intakes of fiber, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B₁₂, folate and calcium with prostate cancer.

The finding suggests that the dietary intakes of vitamin E, lycopene and magnesium could decrease the risk of prostate cancer. Nevertheless, dietary intake of other nutrients such as fiber, calcium, vitamins D, A, B₁₂ and folate was not associated with prostate cancer.

Claim formation is a fact and a regular occurrence in construction industry projects and often leads to a waste of money and time for organizations. Organizations can, however, reduce and control claims by promoting an integrated claim management system and improving productivity in the results of the claims. Establishing a claim management office is one of the ways to help organizations achieve this.

Based on library research, expert opinion and analysis of organizations' contracts as case studies and identifying the root causes of the claim, this paper proposes a claim management office maturity model and determines its levels.

This paper proposes a claim management office maturity model and also determines its levels. The general structure of this model is based on three parameters: “characteristics of each level,” “requirements of each level” and “transition period of each level” in five levels, where the first level is the most basic level and level five is the highest level of the implementation of a claim management office in the organization.

It can be clearly emphasized that this research is one of the first research studies that has dealt with the issue of claim management office in the construction industry and has proposed the model of maturity and development of claim management office in the organization. The use of numerous and experienced experts in achieving the results and case organizations to develop this research has increased the value and credibility of this research. This study also helps to improve the level of claim management in construction industry organizations so that these organizations can implement each level of claim management maturity model in the organization according to their competence and need for claim management. And by implementing it correctly, solve or reduce the problems of claim management in the organization and their projects.

The successful implementation of hospital projects (HPs) tends to confront sundry challenges in the planning and construction (P&C) phases due to their complexity and particularity. Employing key performance indicators (KPIs) facilitates the monitoring of HPs to advance their successful delivery. This study aims to comprehensively investigate the KPIs for hospital planning and construction (HPC).

The KPIs for HPC were identified through a systematic review. Then a comprehensive assessment of these KPIs was performed utilizing a meta-analysis method. In this process, basic statistical analysis, subgroup analysis, sensitive analysis and publication bias analysis were performed.

Results indicate that all 27 KPIs identified from the literature are significant for executing HPs in P&C phases. Also, some unconventional performance indicators are crucial for implementing HPs, such as “Project monitoring effectiveness” and “Industry innovation and synergy,” as their high significance is reflected in this study. Despite the fact that the findings of meta-analysis are more trustworthy than those of individual studies, a high heterogeneity still exists in the findings. It highlights the inherent uncertainty in the construction industry. Hence, this study applied subgroup analysis to explore the underlying factors causing the high level of heterogeneity and used sensitive analysis to assess the robustness of the findings.

There is no consensus among the prior studies on KPIs for HPC specifically and their degree of significance. Additionally, few reviews in this field have focused on the reliability of the results. This study comprehensively assesses the KPIs for HPC and explores the variability and robustness of the results, which provides a multi-dimensional perspective for practitioners and the research community to investigate the performance of HPs during the P&C stages.

This paper aims to propose a new deep learning technique to detect the type of material to improve automated construction quality monitoring.

A new data augmentation approach that has improved the model robustness against different illumination conditions and overfitting is proposed. This study uses data augmentation at test time and adds outlier samples to training set to prevent over-fitted network training. For data augmentation at test time, five segments are extracted from each sample image and fed to the network. For these images, the network outputting average values is used as the final prediction. Then, the proposed approach is evaluated on multiple deep networks used as material classifiers. The fully connected layers are removed from the end of the networks, and only convolutional layers are retained.

The proposed method is evaluated on recognizing 11 types of building materials which include 1,231 images taken from several construction sites. Each image resolution is 4,000 × 3,000. The images are captured with different illumination and camera positions. Different illumination conditions lead to trained networks that are more robust against various environmental conditions. Using VGG16 model, an accuracy of 97.35% is achieved outperforming existing approaches.

It is believed that the proposed method presents a new and robust tool for detecting and classifying different material types. The automated detection of material will aid to monitor the quality and see whether the right type of material has been used in the project based on contract specifications. In addition, the proposed model can be used as a guideline for performing quality control (QC) in construction projects based on project quality plan. It can also be used as an input for automated progress monitoring because the material type detection will provide a critical input for object detection.

Several studies have been conducted to perform quality management, but there are some issues that need to be addressed. In most previous studies, a very limited number of material types were examined. In addition, although some studies have reported high accuracy to detect material types (Bunrit et al., 2020), their accuracy is dramatically reduced when they are used to detect materials with similar texture and color. In this research, the authors propose a new method to solve the mentioned shortcomings.

Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI)-2010, an index that determines the quality of a diet, was created to predict the risk of chronic diseases. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether this index can predict the risk of prostate cancer, one of the most prevalent cancers among men around the world. The study aims to investigate the association between adherence to the AHEI-2010 and the risk of prostate cancer in Iranian men.

The case–control study was conducted in Kermanshah, Iran in the year 2016. The study included 50 cases of Iranian men with prostate cancer and 150 healthy controls. Anthropometric indices were measured by bioelectric impedance analysis (BIA). The AHEI-2010 included 11 food components that were assessed by using a 147-item food frequency questionnaire. A multivariate logistic regression was performed to analyze the association of the AHEI-2010 (expressed as a dichotomous variable) with prostate cancer.

As per the analysis, there were no significant differences in age, body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) between case and control groups, statistically. After adjustment for potential confounders, the higher AHEI-2010 scores were associated with a lower risk of prostate cancer (OR AHEI > 55 vs ≤ 55 = 0.26; 95% CI: 0.11-0.63). Moreover, the Mean of AHEI scores was higher in controls than in the cases (p < 0.001).

The authors’ findings suggest that adherence to the dietary patterns with high scores of AHEI-2010 is associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer, so this index may be used as an effective measure to predict prostate cancer.

Effective leaders have emerged as the cornerstone of project success. The major purpose of this paper is to propose a framework to categorize and prioritize leadership competencies for project managers in megaprojects.

In the first stage, this study utilizes PMBOK 6th Edition, IPMA ICB 4.0 frameworks to develop a hierarchy-based four clusters of leadership competencies. In the second stage, a Fuzzy-AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) approach was employed to prioritize the leadership competencies for an organization dealing in megaprojects. Finally, using ordinal priority approach (OPA), the results of Fuzzy-AHP method are validated.

Based on PMBOK, IPMA and literature, the proposed framework deduced twenty-four leadership competencies and grouped them in four clusters. The Fuzzy-AHP results indicate that among clusters, people competencies cluster is ranked most important, followed by perspective, practice, and innovation competencies. Considering the sub-categories and global weights, culture/values, governance, interpersonal skills, and development and growth emerged as the most important leadership competencies. The results from OPA corroborate the findings of Fuzzy-AHP method.

Megaprojects are characterized by massive investments and extensive economic and social impact. The proposed framework would be an important aid for policymakers to develop suitable strategies and programs to inculcate leadership competencies that would lead to successful project managers and improved project performance.

The need for this research stems from the need to integrate popular project management frameworks in leadership competencies development in project based organizations. The proposed integrated framework, based on PMBOK 6th Edition and IPMA ICB 4.0 competency frameworks, is an original contribution to understand and prioritize leadership competencies for megaproject success.