Given the growing competition in domestic and international agricultural product markets, choosing a business strategy compatible with requirements of marketing resources can guide agro-food firms to maintain and enhance competitive advantages. However, this is not as simple as it seems because the decision-making criteria expressed in a fuzzy manner and the relationship between them can be hierarchical or network-based. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to select the most suitable business strategy and to prioritize marketing resources for one of the major agro-food firms in Iran. To ensure the robustness of the results, both fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy analytic network process (ANP) were applied to prioritize business strategies and marketing resources. The results of both methods revealed that the differentiation strategy had the highest priority in terms of the experts' viewpoints. The results also showed that managerial and customer relationship capabilities were the most important criteria in selecting the differentiation strategy. According to the findings of the study, for the successful implementation of the differentiation strategy, company managers are recommended to take the following three main elements into huge consideration: financial conditions, paying attention to customer's needs and requirements, and the introduction of new products and services.
This chapter studies individual and network conditions for the emergence of large social protests in an agent-based model. We use two recent examples from Iran and Germany to inform the modeling process. In our agent-based model, people, who are interconnected in networks, interact and exchange their concerns on a finite number of topics. They may start to protest either because of their concern or because the fraction of protesters in their social contacts exceeds their protest threshold. In contrast to many other models of social protest, we also study the coevolution of topics of concern in the not (yet) protesting public. Given that often a small number of citizens starts a protest, its fate depends not only on the dynamics of social activation but also on the buildup of concern with respect to competing topics. Nowadays, this buildup happens decentralized through social media. The model reproduces characteristic patterns of the evolution of the two empirical cases of social protests in Iran and Germany. In particular, our results show that positions of agents with certain concern levels on certain topics within the networks are important for the fate of protests.
The present research addressed the problem of common good production referring to a real-world problem in an urban residential complex in Mashhad city, Iran. The residential complex includes four blocks showing different rates of success in the common good production. Analyzing the qualitative field data, using grounded theory framework, we distinguished seven different strategies among residents: vandal, robber, cheater, abider, cooperator, compensator, and punisher. The other main agents' property that seems to be determining in the production of common good is their desirability for them which we quantified it referring to a couple of personal variables. The outputs of the qualitative phase of research let us to design an agent-based model in computer to apply some artificial experiments and find ways for promoting the situation. The results showed that some specific minor changes in agent combinations can make a great difference in the outcomes and solve the complex of cooperation.
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