The effect of COVID-19 lockdown and the subsequent reopening on consumption in Iran

Review of Economics of the Household - We use country-wide data on all electronic payments in point-of-sale (POS) and online terminals of Iran to study the change in the pattern of consumption and...     

Empowering agricultural production cooperatives: a nationwide survey of definitions and strategies in Iran

The empowerment literature lacks a common understanding of the empowerment and the important elements in the empowerment process. This study aimed to create an empirically generated list of definitions and strategies for empowering agricultural production cooperatives (APCs). A nationwide survey was conducted in Iran to achieve the research objectives. Fifty-five (out of 80) government employees involved in agricultural cooperatives’ empowerment and 85 (out of 277) board members of cooperatives who participated in empowerment programmes, were randomly selected to participate in this research. The perceptions of the two groups were compared using t-test to reach consensus. In the end 19 agreed definitions and 32 strategies were provided for empowering the cooperatives. An exploratory factor analysis was used to determine what sets of definitions and what sets of strategies hang together. The study results suggest that empowerment actors in Iran are trying to make cooperative principles governthe cooperative. The article concludes with the discussion of strategies for strengthening empowerment in APCs and implications for human resource development (HRD).     

New high performing heuristics for minimizing makespan in permutation flowshops

The well-known NEH heuristic from Nawaz, Enscore and Ham proposed in 1983 has been recognized as the highest performing method for the permutation flowshop scheduling problem under the makespan minimization criterion. This performance lead is maintained even today when compared against contemporary and more complex heuristics as shown in recent studies. In this paper we show five new methods that outperform NEH as supported by careful statistical analyses using the well-known instances of Taillard. The proposed methods try to counter the excessive greediness of NEH by carrying out re-insertions of already inserted jobs at some points in the construction of the solution. The five proposed heuristics range from extensions that are slightly slower than NEH in most tested instances to more comprehensive methods based on local search that yield excellent results at the expense of some added computational time. Additionally, NEH has been profusely used in the flowshop scheduling literature as a seed sequence in high performing metaheuristics. We demonstrate that using some of our proposed heuristics as seeds yields better final results in comparison.