مطالب

Based on the capital market’s nature, accountants and auditors’ information is provided by an effective influence of personal decisions and market results, derived systematically by information structure and market participants’ features. Auditors’ choices are influenced by perception, judgment and decision options processes, which may affect auditing errors. The study purpose is to investigate auditors’ different biases and decision-making factors on errors based on a cognitive approach in the capital market. The model’s objective is practical based on a descriptive-analytical methodology. The statistical population of the study includes all certified auditors of Iran's Securities and Exchange Organization (SEO), whom were provided with the researcher-made questionnaires with valid narration and reliability. The collected data were analyzed by AMOS software. The findings indicate that components of the cognitive bias are predictable by auditors’ errors based on the priority level and maximum influences, including mental accounting bias (63%), availability bias (45%), heuristic bias (60%), and ambiguity aversion bias (58%). Also, components of decision-making are predictable by auditors’ errors based on the priority level and maximum influences, including decision case (54%), job experience (57%), decision-making situation (58%) and individual features (45%).

Governments always affect the economic environment as legislators in the field of business. The economic conditions governing the market and business require different conditions and contexts for decision making and corporate execution practices. Companies and managers administering them under environmental conditions, achieve their goals by employing various earnings management methods. Hence, the present study examines the effect of governments’ economic performance on the earnings management methods used in listed companies of Tehran Stock Exchange (2004-2016) for a sample of 16 industries and 271 companies. To test the hypotheses, multivariate regression model was used. The results showed that during the research period, companies managed earnings, and while more than 70% of companies used the accrual earnings management method, there was a relationship between annual economic indicators and real earnings management, and the change in general level of prices and the political connections of states have affected the relationship. Also, the accruals-based earnings management method occurred independent of annual economic indicators and there is a significant relationship between governments changes and earnings management methods.

Asset-liability management (ALM) helps managers achieve their respective objectives by surveilling and controlling the ways through which resources are obtained and allocated. Furthermore, with the help of liquidity management, which sets the required cash by banks for fulfilling costs and other needs (e.g. the cash requested by depositors), ALM controls the risk. In addition, ALM helps managers realize profitability and efficiency of the bank through the application of goal programming (GP) whereby multiple objectives are simultaneously considered when making decisions. In the present research, upon collecting the required data and information, acquiring opinions of experts at a sample bank, and investigating balance sheet of the bank while considering respective constraints, orders of priority of objectives were determined. The results indicated consistency of some items in the balance sheet, such as cash inventory and liability to Central Bank with those set by the model. On the other hand, when it came to some other items, including receivables from the government and credited facilities to public sector, the observed growth was in line with that anticipated by the model. In the meantime, for most items of the balance sheet, including termed deposits and other deposits, investments, and joint activities, the model suggested variable yet positive growths; the growth was higher in demand deposits which are known as less expensive resources, indicating facts about Iranian banking system and Iranian economy where communities are making greater deals of effort to attract this sort of resource.

In this study, for the selection of the characteristics of the company that provides the incremental information to investors and financial analysts, the linear models are adapted by the ordinary Lasso method (Tibshirani, 1996), Adaptive Group LASSO (Zu, 2006) and the least squares method (OLS). The main objective of this research is to determine which method can predict the expected return on stock portfolios in the shortest time and using the least effective features. The research sample is1340observations, including 134companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange, and the research variables from the financial statements of the companies and the stock market reports between 2008and 2018. The results of this study show that by employing the least squares regression method, 7 characteristics, the typical 5- characteristics LASSO method and in the Adaptive Group LASSO method, only 4characteristics, contain incremental information to predict the expected returns of stock portfolios. In the second place, by applying the Adaptive Group LASSO regression method, one can achieve the same results with using the least characteristics.

Portfolio selection is one of the most important financial and investment issues. Portfolio selection seeks to allocate a predetermined capital (wealth) over one or multiple time periods between assets and stocks in a such way that the wealth of investor (portfolio owner) is maximized the risks are minimized. In the paper, we first propose a mathematical programming model for Portfolio selection to maximize the minimum amount Sharpe ratios of portfolio in all periods (max-min problem). Then, due to the uncertain property of the input parameters of such a problem, a robust possibilistic programming model (based on necessity theory) has been developed, which is capable of adjusting the robust degree of output decisions to the uncertainty of the parameters. The proposed model has been tested on 27 companies active in the Tehran stock market. At the end, the results of the model demonestrate the good performance of the robust possibilistic programming model.

Purpose: In the shadow of separation of the ownership from the control and the problem of representation arising from it in the modern business world, there is a need to pay attention to the CEOs' approaches toward takeover as decision makers in this area. Managerial entrenchment is considered as one of the consequences of separation of ownership from control that explains the difference between the incentives in the corporate management and causes a disturbance in internal control as a communication mechanism between the corporate's performance and the capital market. Paying attention to operant conditioning behavior like tournament incentives as a functional behavioral stimulus in CEOs reduces the profit-seeking attitudes among them and increases the effectiveness of the corporates' performance mechanisms in disclosing financial reporting. The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between the managerial entrenchment and the internal control weakness by operant conditioning behavior theory test. Design/methodology/approach: In this research, 95 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange were evaluated between  2013 and 2018. Considering the duality of internal control assessment, logistic regression in SPSS software was used in this research. Findings: Results of the research showed that there is positive and significant relationship between the managerial entrenchment and the internal control weakness. But there is a negative and significant relationship between the tournament incentive and the internal control weakness. Moreover, it was found that the negative relationship between the managerial entrenchment and the corporates' internal control is mediated by the tournament incentive. Originality/value: Considering that little attention has been paid to motivational issues of the CEOs under the representation theory over the past few years, the present research attempts to investigate managerial entrenchment approach with the effectiveness of internal controls through analysis of the operant conditioning behavior theory to provide more reliable experimental results for the investors and the shareholders.