رضوان حجازی

As a significant consequence of internal and external characteristics in auditors, independence plays a vital role in promoting professional judgment in auditing. This dimension of individual audit functions has always been considered one of the areas studied in this profession due to its integration with the perceptual and often intangible features of auditors’ behavior. Therefore, this study, understanding the importance of independence functions in the auditing profession, seeks to identify the characteristics of inertia as a stimulus for independence in auditing in the petrochemical industry to act on its interpretive ranking. This research is a mixed method due to the nature of data collection. It first uses interviews to identify the characteristics of inertia in the auditing profession and then employs the checklists of the pair scale to determine the interpretive ranking. Accordingly, the grounded theory and the quantitative part are used in the qualitative part, and Delphi analysis and the interpretive ranking process are used. The statistical population in the qualitative section were 12 auditing professionals who, in terms of theoretical knowledge, had the necessary capabilities to develop the concept studied in this study. They were selected through theoretical sampling based on the snowball technique. The statistical population in the quantitative part were 19 auditors with work experience in the petrochemical industry and a level of technical and specialized knowledge; they were selected using homogeneous sampling. The research results in the qualitative part indicate the existence of 3 categories, 8 components, and 35 concept codes that have laid the inertial features in the auditing profession in the form of an 8-dimensional integrated model. On the other hand, the results in the quantitative part show that the percentage of influence of the locus of control feature is higher than other inertial features in the audit profession in the petrochemical industry, implying that the auditor’s encirclement on individual control in success and failure can avoid a set of external factors such as chance and lead fate in audit functions. In other words, an auditor with the characteristics of an internal locus of control tries to use his/her ability to express independent behavior in professional comments and judgments, regardless of external reasons

Evaluating the performance of companies using their financial ratios is a challenging task that is expected to become more straightforward by reducing the dimensionality of the data. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of companies using a hybrid model for investment-related decision making through which the mean value of various financial ratios are calculated based on the investor's risk-taking behavior so that the number of all criteria is reduced to one single value for each alternative. To do so, a sample of 172 companies listed in Tehran Stock Ex-change was selected from 2008 to -2018. Firstly, the financial ratios were prioritized using decision trees regression analysis (type CART) and TOPSIS Technique. The results showed that Gross Profit Margin and Debt to Equity Ratio are the most and the least important factors, respectively. Then, using OWA (Ordered Weighted Averaging Aggregation) operator, the role of investor’s risk-taking behavior was investigated, and the results showed that investor’s risk-taking behavior changes the outcome of the decision-making process significantly.

Recently, understanding the anomalies in financial markets have severely chal-lenged the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). The price momentum is one of the anomalies described as the unexplained short-term return by Fama and French (1996). The present research strives for modeling the price momentum of winner stock in the Iranian capital market. The grounded theory method was used to explain this phenomenon. To this end, in-depth interviews were held with 32 experts operating in the professional and academic fields in 2018. The collected data was encoded in three steps, and the results were presented as a conceptual paradigm. The research findings identified the momentum causal factors in the behavioral level, the background factors in the social, macroeconomics, and mar-ket levels, the intervening factors in the global economics, macroeconomics, mar-ket, and company levels, and the strategies in the social, macroeconomics, market, the investment and finances institutions, and consequences factors in market level. The research findings suggest that the winner stock price momentum phenomenon should not be considered a speculation opportunity. Rather, it is an anomaly that has to be regulated with the proposed strategies according to the experts. The consequences of the adoption of these strategies include the stable and normal income for the market actors, the decrease in the loss inflicted on natural persons due to the market volatility, the management of anomalies, more effective attrac-tion and allocation of liquid capitals, the reduced credit risk of brokerages, and the acceleration of liquidation in the market.