Leadership and knowledge are often paired together. Yet, certain forces that operate on businesses and individuals are often unknowable. In this study, we consider leaders’ perceptions of the consequences of not knowing and how leaders discursively cope with a sense of not knowing. Based on interviews with 33 participants working in multinational companies in India, we find that leaders perceive negative consequences of not knowing and engage in discursive tactics such as posing, delaying, clarifying, admitting, being silent, and stating “I don’t know,” that sustain and are sustained by the Discourse of leadership as knowledge. The findings contribute to the discursive leadership literature by demonstrating tactics leaders use as they attempt to balance the discursive construction of leadership as knowledge and lived experiences of not knowing. We discuss how the Discourse of leadership as knowledge will hamper knowledge extension as it undermines not knowing and privileges knowing over not knowing.
Abstract: Business – to – Business (B2B) relationships has been a topic of interest for both researchers and practitioners for over four decades. A B2B relationship involves two businesses where one business is seeking the services or goods of the other business for operational, strategic or any other commercial reasons. The unit of analysis in this thesis is the agency–client dyad, defined here as the relationship between the person responsible for renewing the relationship (the client) and those responsible for management of the account (the agency) (Beverland, Farrelly, and Woodhatch 2007). Past research on agency – client relationships in marketing suggests that the focus areas have been in conflict management, client account management, cultural and international perspectives, and co-creation (Keegan, Rowley & Tonge, 2017).
Abstract: Researchers are increasingly confronting the need to examine the impacts of social media on democratic discourse. Using 55560 tweets from the official Twitter accounts of the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA, we examine approaches used by political parties to encourage sharing of their content within the contemporary political divide. We show that tweets sent by the Republican Party are more likely to be predominant in the language of assessment and that tweets predominant in the language of assessment lead to more retweets. Further, this effect is reduced as political parties gain control of successive branches of government. This is because successive increases in political power create fewer impediments to the implementation of a party’s political agenda. As impediments to action are reduced, so is regulatory fit for assessment-oriented language. Goal pursuit language shared on Twitter therefore reveals distinct approaches to obtaining and dealing with power across the US political system and constitutes an important tool for public policy makers to use in successfully conducting policy debates.
As new changes and challenges emerge in organizations and societies, it becomes crucial to understand how individuals cope with traumatic life events and embrace unexpected and abrupt career changes. We leverage the rich contexts provided by the Discontinuous Career Transition theory and the Human Resilience theory to examine the experiences of 17 individuals in India who were compelled to consider different career paths because of either a life-threatening event or an experience of severe loss. Since much of psychological explanations of trauma and loss are generated from the experiences of adults seeking counselling/vocational training/treatment, an empirical study of how trauma victims encounter the challenges of future employment without the help of any professional intervention is called for. We analyzed qualitative data collected from 51 interviews (storytelling in action and oral history), supplemented with archival, and observational data. Our analyses suggested that both “smooth” and "rough" career transitioning are situated in a gender-based interpretation of trauma that informs one’s perceptions about self, career, and family. In the process, we found that a ‘non-nonsense’ approach to trauma is key to the understanding of coping "smoothly" with trauma and getting adjusted to the new career path. We generated a process model of resilience as based on the ideas of gender socialization in India.
Prior research has primarily looked at the negative effects of negative information about celebrities on their effectiveness as brand endorsers. Building on the meaning transfer model and the match-up hypothesis, often used for explaining the persuasiveness of celebrity endorsements, we propose that a negative piece of information about a celebrity’s personal life (a negative gossip story) can actually make the celebrity a better endorser for vice (vs. virtue) products by enhancing the perceived fit of the celebrity with the product/brand. We expect this effect to be stronger for female audiences, who have been shown to be more comprehensive information processors (they tend to be more sensitive to all pieces of information available to them while evaluating advertising messages). However, among the male audiences, who have been shown to be selective information processors (they tend to pay attention primarily to the cues made salient in the advertisement itself), the proposed effect is likely to be weaker. We find support for our theorizing across three experimental studies. This research thus adds to the literature on communication source effects by establishing celebrity gossip stories as subtle cues that could alter audience responses to celebrity endorsements.
We examine how traders’ technology and motivation to trade impact transparency. We show that algorithmic traders (ATs) are more likely to hide orders and their hidden orders receive better execution. High frequency traders (HFTs, a subset of ATs) extensively use small hidden orders that are aggressively priced near the best quotes. Theory suggests that traders hide orders to limit their option value, delay information exposure, and limit competition for liquidity provision. Our results suggest that HFTs hide orders to limit competition when the expected profitability of liquidity provision is higher, while non-algorithmic traders hide orders to limit their option value.
With the rising global consciousness about sustainable use of natural resources, many transnational corporations are promoting and adopting sustainability certification schemes to inform the consumers about the production conditions of a particular commodity and at the same time, contribute to improving the livelihoods of rural households through better market access and provision of a price premium. Sustainability certification is advanced as a ‘win-win’ solution for primary producers, corporation and the environment. Yet, the empirical evidence in this regard is quite scant. This paper looks at the case of sustainable production of abaca, a natural fibre primarily produced by smallholders in the Philippines, and whose most important usage is in the manufacturing of paper for teabags. It analyses a certification scheme, endorsed by Rainforest Alliance, and promoted by the world’s largest producer of teabag paper and supplier to the market leaders in tea industry. The study, based on fieldwork including direct observation, interviews and focus group discussions with a range of stakeholders, examines to what extent sustainable agriculture certification might be an effective tool to increase productivity, reduce ecological impact of agricultural production and contribute to an improvement of the livelihood conditions of smallholder farmers. Rather than showing whether certification works or not, it unravels the process of certification, inclusion and exclusion. Furthermore, it shows how are the global standards interpreted, accepted, or tweaked by the farmers. The findings suggest that unlike common understanding, price premium is not the main factor for joining the scheme, and that unfavorable trading practices are the biggest challenge faced by abaca farmers. Future certification schemes, it is argued, should aim at enhancing transparency of the trading system, and not simply focus on what the certifiers consider to be good for the people and environment.
A Stay-at-home intervention has been a necessary but sudden behavioral change required during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims to understand the impact of a stay-at-home intervention on prosocial behaviors towards close vs. distant beneficiaries. We theorize and show that a stay-at-home intervention, in the context of a pandemic, affects prosocial choice behavior through a combination of two threats (social deprivation and infection). Results from three studies show that a stay-at-home intervention, though not impacting the overall prosocial behavior, leads to a higher choice proportion for prosocial behavior towards close (over distant) beneficiaries. Contributions to theory and implications for policy makers/practitioners are discussed.
Presence of excess zero in ordinal data is pervasive in areas like Medical and social sciences. Unfortunately, analysis of such kind of data has so far hardly been looked into, perhaps for the reason that the underlying model that fits such data, is not a Generalized linear model. Obviously some methodological developments and intensive computations are required. The current investigation is concerned with the selection of variables in such models. In many occasions where the number of predictors is quite large and some of them are not useful, the maximum likelihood approach is not the automatic choice. As, apart from the messy calculations involved, this approach fails to provide efficient estimates of the underlying parameters. The proposed penalized approach includes L1 penalty (LASSO) and the mixture of L1 and L2 penalties (Elastic net). We propose a coordinate descent algorithm to fit a broad class of ordinal regression models and select useful variables appearing in both the ordinal regression and the logistic regression based mixing component. A rigorous discussion on the selection of predictors has been made through a simulation study. The proposed method is illustrated by analyzing the severity of driver injury from Michigan upper peninsula road accidents.
To study why science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students in India leave STEM career, my colleagues and I conducted 156 in-depth interviews over a span of three years (2015-2018). Out of these 156 people, 17 people reported personal trauma at some point of their lives as the reason behind their career changes. These 17 life stories are extraordinary. They are not only phenomenal but also emotionally touching and deeply reflexive in nature. Consequently my colleagues and I felt hesitant to use these 17 transcripts while developing the earlier manuscripts. Our initial research papers out of these data are essentially based on the other 139 interviews. However, during the summer of 2019, one of the 17 people contacted us regarding an update of the study - which made us realize that we do have a social responsibility toward these 17 respondents.
The small but a growing body of research on the team vs. team competition focuses on multilevel factors including the team’s strength or prior relations among team members within a team, which influences the relative performance of teams. A fundamental contribution of our research is demonstrating the significance and power of the ecosystem factor in the outcome of a contest. In the context of the Indian Premier League, the ecosystem refers to the situation where former teammates compete against each other when playing for their franchise-owned teams. We use data of over a period of 8-seasons of the Indian Premier League, to demonstrate the effects of competing against former teammates on the outcome of a Cricket match. If two teams A and B are competing in a match, and nA players from A and nB players from B are former teammates, then the ecosystem factor is defined as the difference between nA and nB. Using linear regressions, Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure, and Exponential Random Graph Model we observe that the ecosystem factor significantly improves the team’s odds of winning, beyond individuals’ skills and relations. We provide novel empirical insights to deepen our understanding of the ongoing research on team assembly mechanisms.
In 2012, in India, the federal government liberalized the economy by announcing a 51% foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail stores, also known as shopping malls. Although the new form of retail space signals economic growth and urbanization, it also engenders and systematizes inequalities. In such a context, using 51 interviews and on-site observations, I explore how do service providers and customers interact in shopping malls, specifically in cosmetic counters. I found rurality-urbanity entangled with gender and class as salient in the participants’ accounts. I contribute to the literature on embodied service work, by theorizing rural embodiment and its impact on the workers, as well as urban customers, through the idea of a culture of servitude.
Existing literature takes a "marketing or psychology" perspective on the sources of barriers in customer journeys and assumes that these are resolvable by firm controlled "touchpoints." Furthermore, BOP consumption literature assumes an absence of barriers beyond acquisition stage. Our year-long phenomenological investigation of technology consumption among BOP consumers in India reveals existence of post acquisition barriers.
The agrarian landscape in Ethiopia is witnessing a dramatic change owing to the recent policy shift in favor of large-scale land deals for establishing commercial farms. The government has used low land lease costs as incentives to promote investment, both foreign and domestic. In return it expects increased foreign exchange and food production. The results so far are far from encouraging. Yet, large tracts of old state farms, ‘idle’ land, and grazing areas are being handed over to private investors. For local communities, it involves massive dispossession and loss of access to grazing or open scrubs. The debate on large-scale land acquisitions is largely divided into two polarized camps: those considering promotion of commercial farming as a panacea for agricultural transformation, and those considering ‘land grabbing’ as contributing to further marginalization of the rural poor. This paper, based on empirical evidence from Oromia region argues that the reality is much more complex than the two opposing viewpoints offer. Rather than approaching the question of land deals from the ideological position of whether they are ‘good or ‘bad’, the paper addresses the ‘how’ of land investments. It will try to answer the following questions: How have different investors performed thus far, and what distinguishes the ‘successful’ from the ‘failed’? What is the role of the state in influencing patterns of agrarian transformation in Ethiopia? And how have the local communities responded to these changes.
Global supply chains comprise suppliers who exhibit varying degrees of social responsibility compliance. Often, such supply chains experience fatal disruptions occurring due to responsibility violations committed by the suppliers. For instance, the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh and the explosion at the Zhongrong metal parts factory in China resulted in loss of lives and property. Such disruptions invite scathing attacks on the procuring firms (“buyers”) by external entities such as media, non-governmental organizations etc., which in turn negatively affect the buyers' reputation and financial condition. External entities can also penalize suppliers committing the violations, which could be “direct" (violations committed at their facilities) or “indirect" (e.g. unauthorized subcontracting (UAS)). In our paper, we treat these social responsibility issues as supply chain disruptions and analyze the potential of such disruptions on buyer-supplier relationships.
Human activity recognition is an essential part of applications such as content-based video analytics, robotics, human-computer interaction and surveillance. It involves automatically detecting, tracking and recognizing multiple human activities acquired through sensors. The raw data captured by the sensors are often noisy, and there exists uncertainty in the training data regarding its target class. Moreover, training a multicategory classifier with so many features in the data is computationally costly. To address these challenges, in this article, we propose a multicategory kernel fuzzy proximal support vector machine. We perform computer simulations on the benchmark problems and compare with the results of the well-established method. The comparison shows that our method is not only fast but also yields better generalization ability in most of the test cases.
Employees’ expression of challenging yet constructive ideas, concerns and opinions about the issues in the workplace is broadly conceptualized as voice behavior. Employee voice has increasingly been recognized as a critical factor affecting both the employees and the organization. Given its importance, the literature on voice has made significant advances towards better understanding of its cause and consequences. However, there are calls for more studies to identify the contexts that promote or impede employees’ voice behavior. Studies so far are either silent or have considered voice in a context marked with certainty. In the present study we are extending the literature by examining voice behavior in an uncertain social context i.e., when perceived politics in the organization is high. This is an important miss for two reasons. One, organizations are conceptualized as political arenas and politics is considered as an essential feature of organizations. Two, even though, Hirschman (1970) in his seminal work, emphasized the role of politics on employee voice, surprisingly, empirical studies linking politics to employee voice is missing in the literature.
Extended plot (or sequel) advertisements are a popular genre in advertising. The strategy relies on consumer recall in order to build brand recognition and preference. These strategies are executed in two stages. In the first stage, marketers create and develop a storyline or theme about the brand through an ad. In the second stage, the plot from this ad is extended to a new ad (or series of ads) thus taking advantage of the consumer’s memory of the first ad and reinforcing the brand and its position. We employ three lab experiments to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of plot extended advertising strategies on consumers’ attention and attitudes towards the advertised brand. In the first study we demonstrate the superiority of plot extended ads over repeated original plot (or ordinary) ads. In our second study, we demonstrate that message form, whether the format of communication is an argument or a narrative, moderates the effectiveness of plot extended ads. In our third study, we demonstrate that the higher processing fluency in extended plot ads mediates the route through which they affect consumers’ cognition and affect, as seen so far in the first two studies.
Public cloud capacity providers offer various pricing models namely, on-demand capacity instances, reserved capacity instances, and a hybrid of these two pricing models. The buyer firms seeking cloud solutions not only source their requirements from the public cloud providers but also invest in some private in-house information technology (IT) infrastructure. In this paper, we find conditions for implementing each of the above pricing models by a public cloud provider given that the buyer firm will also invest in private capacity. We develop a game-theoretic model to determine the cloud provider's pricing schemes and the conditions to offer various pricing models. We discuss various insights and important business implications for the public cloud providers.
In socioeconomics or in Biological studies, observations on individuals are often observed longitudinally on a Likert-type scale with substantially large proportion of zeros. This leads to a special case of mixture-structured data where extra-variation occurs. Obviously the standard ordinal data analysis fails to provide appropriate statistical inference. We propose a suitable zero inflated semiparametric ordinal models that take into account the non-linear link between the ordinal response and a covariate. A sieve maximum likelihood estimator(MLE) is proposed for the regression parameter of interest. We also propose a test for the zero proportion in this semi parametric model. A simulation study has been carried out to investigate the performance of the estimator as well as the test.
The effect of marketing expenditure on firm value during an external shock is not well understood in the literature. Financial crisis, change in policy, or entry of a foreign company into a domestic market could lead to change in marketing expenses and/or reallocation in the total marketing expenses (between advertising, promotional, and distribution expenses), which would further affect firm value. In addition, past literature has studied advertising expenses or SG&A, a proxy of total marketing expenses, instead of actual marketing expenses because of a lack of availability of data. In this research article, we authors address these issues. We investigate the effect of marketing expenses on firm value during 2008 financial crisis. Further we study the effect of actual marketing expenses (and not proxies) and its components on firm value across industries by leveraging a unique data set. We They estimated the models using a panel data of Indian companies from Prowess database for years 1988 to 2017.We find that total marketing and advertising expenses have a significant and positive effect on market value whereas distribution expenses have a negative significant effect. We also They observe that post the 2008 crisis, advertising expenses continue to have a significant positive effect on market value and accordingly it is seen that firms have increased their advertising expenses post crisis.
This article examines the relationship between the perceived differentiation of organizational actors at the center of an organizational field and the possibility of a status quo threatening institutional change. Our study shows that in a context where the institutionalized dimension of differentiation is weakening, perceived differentiation of central organizational actors in the field, instead of decreasing, increases audience support to an institutional change that will threaten the position of such organizations. In the later phases of the decline of the differentiation dimension, we further observe that the relationship between the perceived differentiation of organizations and the support for institutional change abates as audiences start to sideline and ignore organizational differentiation based on the substantially declined dimension of differentiation. The findings of our study contribute to works on organizational differentiation, institutional change, and political science.
We consider affirmative action in large population Tullock contests. The standard Tullock contest is an equal treatment contest in which agents who exert equal effort have an equal probability of success. In contrast, under affirmative action, agents with equal cost of effort have equal probability of success. We analyze these contests as generalized aggregative potential games. We show that both contest have a unique Nash equilibrium. Under affirmative action, all agents have identical equilibrium payoff. Further, in both equilibria, aggregate payoff in society is equal. Therefore, affirmative action ensures an equal outcome without any loss of efficiency, where efficiency is defined in terms of aggregate payoff. Numerical solutions suggest that when the number of agents is finite, there is some loss of efficiency, which goes to zero as society converges to the large population limit. Hence, one interpretation of our result is that affirmative action engenders equality without causing significant inefficiency when the number of agents involved is large.
In practice, a reliable and flexible estimation of risk-neutral density from empirical data is a challenging task since risk-neutral density cannot be observed directly from the market. In this study, we apply Bernstein polynomial basis to recover the risk-neutral density function from the observed price quotes of European-type option contingent on an underlying asset. More importantly, we perform an extensive simulation study to examine the flexibility and robustness of the proposed method in recovering different shapes of the true risk-neutral density function from noisy option price quotes. Also, we compare the proposed method with other two popular nonparametric methods namely the con- strained local linear polynomial smoothing and the smoothed implied volatility smile reported in the literature. Accuracy and stability of the three nonparametric methods are assessed by the root mean integrated square error criterion. The simulation results show that the proposed method is flexible as it exhibits the various shapes of the true risk-neutral density function even when the volatility is high. Moreover, in comparison with the other two methods, the proposed approach is robust and yields more accurate densities even in the presence of noise. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method in recovering a smooth risk-neutral density function from the S&P 500 market index option data.
Prof. Ram Gopal would present a research seminar on March 15th at 3:30 pm. The title of the seminar is " Website Third–Parties: Information Sharing, Privacy, Economics, and Fake News Detection"
Ram D. Gopal is the Information Systems Society’s Distinguished Fellow and has served as the Head of the Department of Operations and Information Management in the School of Business, University of Connecticut from 2008-2018. As the Department Head, he initiated a new Master of Science degree program in Business Analytics and Project Management in 2011 and an undergraduate business major in Business Data Analytics in 2014. He has a diverse and a rich portfolio of research that spans big data analytics, health informatics, information security, privacy and valuation, intellectual property rights, online market design and business impacts of technology. His research has appeared in Management Science, Management Information Systems Quarterly, Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Information Systems Research, Journal of Business, Journal of Law and Economics, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, and other journals and conference proceedings. He has served on the editorial boards of Information Systems Research, Decision Sciences, Journal of Database Management, Information Systems Frontiers, and Journal of Management Sciences, and has served as the President of the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems organization from 2016 to 2018.
Prof. Vikas Agarwal would present a research seminar on Friday, March 8th at 2:30 pm. The title of the seminar is "Violence and investor behavior: Evidence from terrorist attacks.
Prof. Agarwal is a Bank of America Distinguished Chair and Professor of Finance. He has obtained his PhD from London Business School and his research interest is in Asset Pricing and Investments. For more information refer the following link - http://www2.gsu.edu/~fncvaa.
Prof. Manu Gupta is a recipient of CIMI postdoc fellowship since August 2017 at Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) where his current work is related to multi-armed restless bandits. His research is focused on stochastic operations research, in particular on controls of queues and sequential decision making. He received his masters and PhD degree from Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at IIT Bombay. He also received best thesis award for his PhD work in dynamic priority queues at IIT Bombay.
Prof. Tes Raghavan would present a research seminar on Monday at 3:30 pm. The title of the seminar is " On an iterative approach to compute the nucleolus for assignment games" I'll confirm the venue details by Monday morning.
Prof. Raghavan is an emeritus professor in the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a PhD from Indian Statistical Institute. He has published more than 60 remarkable papers. For more information refer the following link - Profile.
Prof. Ashiq Ali would present a research seminar on "Accounting Profitability and Takeover Likelihood " on Tuesday, January 15th from 11:00 am to noon.
Prof. Ali holds Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair in Accounting at the Naveen Jindal School of Management, the University of Texas at Dallas and is one of the foremost research scholars in the field of Accounting. His research examines the role of financial accounting information in the capital markets, and he has published extensively in top Accounting and Finance journals. His profile can be accessed at http://www.utdallas.edu/~axa042200/
Prof. Rakesh Pati would present a research seminar on January 11th from 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm.
Dr. Rakesh Pati is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and Research Fellow (Center of Workplace Leadership) at the Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne. Prior to Melbourne, he worked as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota and as Assistant Professor in Strategy at XLRI – Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur. He has published in top journals, such as Long Range Planning, and co-authored manuscripts with top strategy and international business scholars such as Prof. Shaker Zahra, Prof. Michael Hitt, and Prof. Duane R Ireland. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and Robert E Buuck Research Fellow in Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota during his doctoral program. Before moving into academia, he earned his MBA in Marketing & Strategy and worked at Larsen & Toubro Infotech as Business Development and Marketing Executive. Rakesh has extensive experience in research, training, and consulting in the fields of management, strategy, entrepreneurship, and decision-making. He works closely with several large privately held firms and business groups, SMEs, government organisations, NGOs, public sector organisations and entrepreneurs in Australia, USA, and India on their strategies, business models, strategic decision-making, governance, and management practices. He currently holds Ruthven Hub Fellowship at the University of Melbourne and is involved in multiple engaged research projects and grants, including Australian Research Council and CRC-P grant proposals.
Prof. Niharika Garud would present a research seminar on January 11th from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm.
Dr. Niharika Garud is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Management at the Department of Management & Marketing and Research Fellow at the Centre for Workplace Leadership at Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne. Prior to Melbourne, Niharika worked as a faculty member at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Niharika has published in top journals in management, such as Personnel Psychology, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, and has extensive experience in research and consulting in the areas of management, Niharika’s formal training includes a PhD in Management from IIM Bangalore, Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of Missouri Columbia and Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering along with Pre-doctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University. Niharika works closely with several Fortune 500 firms along with other privately held firms, entrepreneurs and ventures as well as government organisations across the globe, especially in Australia, USA and India on enhancing their management practices, improving their decision and innovation processes, as well as in refining their management systems for higher productivity. She is currently working with Victorian Government, Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, Association with Dial Before You Dig Services among other organisations on engaged research and consulting projects.
Prof. Christopher Sutter would present a research seminar on January 10th from 10:30 am to 11:30 am.
Chris Sutter is the David F. Herche Endowed Assistant Professor at Miami University. His research focuses on entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation. Specifically, he focuses on the role of entrepreneurial intermediaries in building more inclusive markets. Chris' work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Business Venturing, and Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice. He has ongoing or completed fieldwork in Guatemala, Nicaragua, India, and Ghana. He has traveled widely in Latin America and is fluent in Spanish.
In this paper, we empirically examine whether price regulation of generic essential drugs in India results in social welfare (in terms of increase in sales volume post regulation). In 2013, the Indian government enacted the Drug Price Control Order (DPCO) which regulated the prices of essential medicines (total of 348 medicines). Using historical monthly sales volume (number of pills) data over a 4 year period, we identify the best fitting SARIMA (seasonal auto regressive integrated moving average) model for each of the 105 oral solid molecules included in DPCO 2013. This model is then used to estimate a baseline of sales volume post DPCO. Following the event study approach we statistically compare the baseline against the actual volume over a one year period. We find that while DPCO resulted in an increase in sales volume for few molecules, overall, we find that the regulation has resulted in a reduction in sales volume. We further analyze the results of the event study and explain the increase (or decrease) using few market level variables including absolute regulation price, extent of price reduction faced by the market, whether the molecule is prescribed for acute or chronic illnesses, proportion of sales from CP/GP (Consultant Physician / General Practitioner) prescriptions, proportion of sales from urban and semi urban cities, industry level detailing efforts for the drug and an interaction term between the last two items. Our results indicate that increasing the detailing efforts for molecules with high percentage sales in urban and semi-urban cities may result in positive DPCO impact. Our findings have significant policy and marketing implications.
Coherent systems are important structures in reliability. In this paper, we discuss the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of model parameters of a n-component system with known signature having an exponential component lifetime distribution based on a simple step-stress model. We also develop confidence intervals for the model parameters. A detailed Monte Carlo simulation study is carried out to examine the performance of the point estimates as well as the interval estimation methods. Finally, a data analysis is performed for illustrating all the inferential methods developed here.
The aim of this study is to investigate the gender experiences of women at work emerging in the event of motherhood through an exploratory grounded incursion. Event of motherhood provides an interesting context for investigation of gender at work due to prevalence of arguments in research about the impact of increase in demands at home on the career motivation of women with younger kids. The impact of motherhood on the working of women is even more intense in the case of professional women as they have gained professional education to develop their career and motherhood raises questions even about their career motivation. This study by adopting a phenomenological lens for incursion discerns the disruptions and dilemmas that unravel the conflicts experienced by the professional working women caught between being a good employee and a good mother.
We model the welfare implications of the expansion of the microfinance industry. We initially characterize the equilibrium with a sole fund-constrained benevolent credit institution followed by the entry of a profit-oriented microfinance sector. By comparing these two equilibria, we show that expansion can lead to an increase in interest and default rates and a decline in screening costs. This situation still represents a Pareto improvement since: (i) screening costs go down and (ii) all agents previously denied credit can obtain loan from the expansion phase.
The study aims to understand how leaders deal with situations in which they have a sense of not knowing. In other words, how leaders negotiate their self in relation to their work and social context in times of not knowing. Using constructivist grounded theory methodology, based on 33 in-depth interviews, it was found that participants' construal of meaning of not knowing included not just lack of knowledge but also lack of control. The article presents the vulnerable side of leadership as opposed to the popular, grandiose or dark side of it. To manage their vulnerability of not knowing, participants engaged in rhetoric (to cover up their not knowing), flexibility, and improvisation (to attempt to move from not knowing to knowing), and letting go (to accept or submit to the inevitability of not knowing). The study contributes to leadership research as well as practice.
In a wide spectrum of natural and social sciences, very often one encounters a large number of predictors for time to event data. An important task is to select right ones, and thereafter carry out the analysis. The `1 penalized regression, known as least absolute shrinkage and selection operator" (LASSO) has become a popular approach for predictor selection in last two decades. The LASSO regression involves a penalizing parameter (commonly denoted by ) that controls the extent of penalty and hence plays a crucial role to identify the right covariates. In this paper we propose an information theory-based method to determine the value of in association with the Cox proportional hazards model. Furthermore, an e client algorithm is discussed in the same context. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method through an extensive simulation study. We compare the performance of our proposals with existing method. Finally, the proposed method and the algorithm are illustrated on a real data set.
The international business and management literature is dominated by the national culture perspective pioneered by Hofstede (1980) with his national culture dimensions and scores, and extended by Gelfand et al. (2011), House et al. (2004) and Schwartz (1999). Our research shows that:
A new feature pertaining to proposer's ability to implement offers is introduced in the extensive form bargaining mechanism studied in Okada (1996). This mechanism is used to analyze two classes of coalitional games with transferable utility. One class is that of strictly supermodular games; the other has the property that per capita value is increasing as a coalition adds to its members. The new feature in the mechanism is that the proposer has a choice to implement his proposal with any subset of responders who have accepted it. Thus the institutional feature of 'every responder has veto power' is relaxed here. It is shown that for all sufficiently high discount factors δ , there exists an efficient subgame perfect equilibrium in pure stationary strategies (SSPE) whose limiting outcome is the core-constrained Nash Bargaining Solution. For strictly supermodular games, Core constraints are binding on Nash Bargaining Solution while for the other class they are not. Also, all efficient SSPE are payoff-equivalent in the limit as δ → 1 .
We consider a risk reserve process for an insurance company where premium income and the claim sum process are modeled as a renewal reward processes. Moreover,dividends are paid out according to a barrier rule. The aim of the paper is to establish a diffusion approximation of this model and to compute ruin probabilities (in finite and in infinite time) and other relevant statistics approximately using the limiting diffusion process. We also demonstrate that under special circumstances there exist a stationary distribution for the limiting diffusion
This paper proposes a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection that introduces the notion of screening, which is distinct from sorting; and distinguishes between unobservable ability that is privately known by the agent and observable ability that is known by the principal and market. Sorting is the traditional process by which the adverse selection problem is resolved. Screening is the process we propose by which agents that are deemed to be unsuitable are rejected. Used in conjunction with sorting, we consider ex-post screening: the principal rejects an agent below an endogenous threshold level of unobservable ability. The threshold is higher (i.e., the principal is more selective) the greater are the cost of effort, degree of risk aversion, and reservation utility of the agent, and the lower are the precision and sensitivity associated with the outcome. Surprisingly, a positive relationship between the unobservable and observable measures of ability tends to imply that observable ability has a negative effect on the incentives and compensation of the agent, as well as the expected outcome and profit of the firm. Thus, both the agent and principal are penalized when pubic signals are "positively" informative about private signals.
Opportunistic behaviour is prevalent in supply chains, particularly, in developing countries. We focus on antecedents of opportunism in developing the construct and provide empirical evidence based on a survey of causes and perceptions of opportunism among Ugandan manufacturing firms which engage in some level of opportunism. We also consider the effect of firm size, particularly, the differences among firms of different sizes in their perceptions on opportunism. Results show that a favourable perception of opportunism increases the likelihood of opportunism across all firm sizes, however, firms differ in relation to the influence of reward power, information sharing, long term orientation, relationship quality, cooperative history and decision synchronisation depending on whether they are small, medium or large. While our study is limited to self-reported opportunism, the results question accepted findings from previous research and raise issues around the size of firms in opportunistic behaviour.
In this paper, the gender-related wage differentials in the rural and urban sectors of the Indian economy are analysed. The hypotheses that there is a glass-ceiling effect—a greater wage gap at the top end of the wage-distribution range—and a sticky-floor effect—a wider wage gap at the bottom are examined. Findings show evidence of the glass-ceiling effect in the rural sector and evidence of the sticky-floor effect in the urban sector. Using a counterfactual decomposition method, the raw wage gap is decomposed to identify the contributions of characteristics and coefficients. The results reveal the presence of labour–market discrimination against women. Furthermore, women at the lower end of the wage-distribution spectrum face more discrimination than those at the higher end of the range.
In this paper we explore the effect of environmental regulations and costs of greening on firms. Our problem deals with the case of a single firm and duopoly to study the pricing and greening decision of players under environmental regulations and increasing costs. We also analyze their impact on consumers. Through this problem we address the burgeoning challenges that firms face in the presence of competition and environmental regulations. This research lays the platform for future work in the area of `green' product pricing, environmental contract design mechanisms and study of impact of environmental regulations on firms and supply chains.
Combining established modelling techniques from multiple-criteria decision aiding with recent algorithmic advances in the emerging field of preference learning, we propose a new method that can be seen as an adaptive version of TOPSIS, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution decision model (or at least a simplified variant of this model). On the basis of exemplary preference information in the form of pairwise comparisons between alternatives, our method seeks to induce an 'ideal solution' that, in conjunction with a weight factor for each criterion, represents the preferences of the decision maker. To this end, we resort to probabilistic models of discrete choice and make use of maximum likelihood inference. First experimental results on suitable preference data suggest that our approach is not only intuitively appealing and interesting from an interpretation point of view but also competitive to state-of-the-art preference learning methods in terms of prediction accuracy.
We focus on the problem of distribution to the millions of small shops that constitute the retail sector in India, as well as many other developing countries, and account for a significant fraction of retail sales. We model the role of a stockist { a supply chain entity whose role is to facilitate distribution. The stockist purchases product from the manufacturer, develops retailer interest in carrying the product, solves the logistics problem of delivery to retailers and manages retail credit and money collection. In return, the stockist is paid a margin that is a percent of product cost. We use a principal agent model structure, with a complements or substitutes relationship between manufacturer assistance and retailer impact, to understand the optimal contract structure i.e., level of assistance and associated retail margin. Data from Indian industry provides information regarding di erent levels of assistance provided by the manufacturer to the stockist as well as choices made by di erent manufacturer are explained by the model. The paper thus provides insights for manufacturers seeking entry into the fragmented retail market in developing countries. In this regard, we demonstrate how a manufacturer can adjust its product assortments in view of the ease of reaching out to retail outlets to improve the profitability while o ering less margin and support both to its stockist.
Nutraceuticals, a combination of nutrition and pharmaceutical, have grown rapidly as a product globally. Nutraceuticals could be advertised directly to the consumers as well as prescribed and thus involves multiple stakeholders in the marketing communication process. The present study investigates the marketing communication aspects of nutraceuticals using 216 semi-structured in-depth interviews including all stakeholders in the process such as, company/brand, physicians, pharmacists and consumers. The findings bring out the role of each participant in the communication process and a comprehensive picture of the same. The insights would facilitate the nutraceutical brands to understand and implement marketing effective communication strategies.
We develop an efficient method for the construction of a family of arbitrage free implied volatility smile curves. For each available maturity on a given trading day, the proposed algorithm constructs an option pricing function of strike price using Bernstein polynomial basis. Further, the properties of this basis allows us to transform the sufficient conditions of no arbitrage, to a set of linear constraints. The resultant linearly constrained least square minimization problem is solved using quadratic programming algorithm. Finally, arbitrage free implied volatility smile is constructed using Dekker-Brent method. We empirically test the proposed method on S&P 500 option price data. Based on in-sample test, we demonstrate that our proposed method performs well in terms of accuracy.
Production systems with closed-loop facilities must deal with the problem of sequencing batches in consecutive loops. This article studies a problem encountered in a production facility in which plastic parts of several shapes must be painted with different colors to satisfy the demand given by a set of production orders. The shapes and the colors produce a dual-setup problem that to the best of our knowledge has not been considered in the literature. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer program and the limitations of this approach as a viable solution method are discussed. Two alternative solution approaches are described that are heuristic in nature: one specialized procedure developed from scratch and the other one built in the framework of commercial software. The presented computational experiments were designed to assess the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches
We argue that perceived prestige of an organization influences organizational identification via perceptions of psychological contract breach over time. We examine changes in these variables during the first year of 1346 newcomers over critical points including entry, institutional socialization and first assignment and how the dynamic accounts of these variables predict employee turnover three years later. Our five-wave results suggest that newcomers experience curvilinear trends in prestige and identification over time which initially rise during institutionalized socialization, then fall immediately and finally stabilize with final upswings to some extent as employee settle into their first assignment. The trend in psychological contract breach follows an opposite pattern. Employee qualifications and cross-cultural transitions moderate these change patterns, which subsequently predict speed of turnover.
Policy debate around augmenting presence of women on boards is gaining traction worldover. This study examines impact of independent women directors (IWD) on the financial performance of Indian firms by using a firm-year unit of analysis. Final sample consists of 148 large Indian firms that operate across representative industries. Financial as well as board composition data of sample firms has been collected for five financial years FY 2008 - 2009 to FY 2012-2013. Panel data analysis employs percentage of independent women directors as the independent variable and firm performance measured by ROA and Tobin's Q as the dependent variables. The primary result of the study using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Fixed Effects (FE) estimation models indicates a positive and significant relationship between percentage of independent women directors and firm performance. However, results are reversed when the Arellano Bond estimation is used.
The study also documents that number of companies with no IWD is reducing across the five years of study. Also, the number of companies with one IWD is increasing over the period of the study, while number of companies with two or three or more directors is more or less the same. This may be attributed to external pressure created by stakeholders. A plausible explanation of why the number of two or three IWD companies remaining the same could be lack of availability of IWD's.
The market place is changing rapidly so are various promotion styles. This research examines how discounting can be effectively used as a promotional tool for new product releases. We investigate the effects of discount sizes, time of release of a new product, and individual differences in temporal orientation on consumers' purchase intentions and attitude toward the product. Results from a pilot study and a between-subjects experiment show that consumers' temporal orientation dictates how they will perceive a discount size along with the time of release of a new product. The findings also indicate that value of the deal will mediate the conditional effects of discount size, time of release, and individuals' temporal orientation. The findings demonstrate how discounting and temporal framing of product release can be effectively used as a new product promotion. We also discuss the managerial implications of this research and provide directions for future research.
Purpose: The present study draws on existing knowledge and investigates how luxury is perceived in a developing nation with economic and cultural diversity. The present study aims to develop a conceptual framework to understand luxury buying behavior in a developing nation context.
Design/methodology/approach: The study applies qualitative research (focused group discussions) with 72 luxury consumers (and partly with practitioners) of apparel and accessories in two major metro cities and two major non-metro cities of India.
Findings: A framework of luxury buying behavior was constructed with cultural background, antecedents, buying process and post purchase consequences of luxury buying behavior as its sub constructs. Gender was identified as a moderating variable between antecedents of purchase and purchase behavior.
Research implications: The most important contribution of the present study is the creation of a comprehensive framework of luxury buying behavior within a developing nation context and a set of testable propositions to further validate using quantitative research.
Practical implications: Provides the manager with a workable model of luxury buying behavior that he/she could use to generate the right consumer responses.
Originality/value: The present study is the first of its kind which integrates cultural backdrop, antecedents and consequences of luxury consumption in the context of a developing nation.
Keywords: Luxury Buying Behavior, Qualitative Research, Conceptual Model, India, Focus Group Discussion.
The question before all of us today is, how do we get righteousness in the heart?" In short, this is the question that sums up the leadership quest and epitomizes the challenge of spiritual-based leadership. Accordingly, in this research project, we have attempted to identify an integrative framework for spirituality in leadership which; (a) spells out a holistic vision that combines societal well-being and ecological ethics with individual advancement and organisational viability, providing each their appropriate niche and the space, (b) outlines a wholesome organisational process that respects individual dignity, fosters healthy relationships among people, and facilitates growth and excellence among them through joyous self-expedition and self-fulfillment. (Replacing the contemporary dysfunctional organisational context), and (c) specifies the distinctive profile of spiritual leadership (together with a set of required attributes and perspectives) which has the capacity to translate the above vision into practical context.
The paper endeavors to identify a leadership model which embraces spirituality in an integral way. The inclusive and systemic model has been derived from the rich traditions of Indian Philosophical thought, which have stood the test of time, and which are essentially anchored in a nature-friendly and humanistic world-view. Using exploratory research to re-interpret the ancient wisdom and recontextualise it for contemporary requirements, the paper principally relies on the conceptual frameworks and anchors of Yoga and Vedanta systems, delves into them by accessing the original texts such as Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Yogasutras of Patanjali together with forays into epics like Mahabharata and Kavyas such as Raghuvamsa, all of which have provided valuable insights. Besides, we also touched upon other traditions such as Buddhist, through works like Prajna Paramita Sutra, Jataka Tales, and Buddhacharitha, which illuminate the leadership discourse in novel ways.
While presenting the background including the current organizational context and the challenges faced by leaders in leading their organizations, a comprehensive survey of literature that encompasses extant literature on leadership in general and literature relating to the spiritual dimension of leadership in particular, has also been covered. Further, the framework of Dharma, Yagna and Yoga are discussed, with specific reference to leadership, based on an in-depth analysis of how these timeless principles can be adapted to timely leadership issues of contemporary organizations. While presenting leadership practices that can translate into action the various themes, profiles of some exceptional leaders, whose lives exemplify the application of some of the ideas is also presented. Besides this, we have endeavored to apply the elements of the framework to the leadership styles of a set of outstanding leaders, who have attained remarkable success in their respective spheres, facilitated by a strong spiritual dimension in their leadership profile.
The authors hope that the working paper will serve to identify further new vistas for conceptualizing comprehensive leadership traits and characteristics. The paper will help to identify research to further analyse spiritual based leadership in order to develop deeper understanding of 'integrative leadership' and further insights into alternative leadership models.
This paper studies a two-sided matching market with intermediation, where an incumbent matchmaker faces the threat of entry from a potential entrant. When the payoff from matching is complementary in the types of the agents, and when the market is large enough, we show that strategic entry accommodation is the optimal strategy for the incumbent, not entry deterrence. .
This paper introduces envy into the study of compensatory-discrimination (or "affirmative-action") policies. I consider the policies that individuals who are aware of the disutility of envy would choose behind a veil of ignorance. Envy is defined as occurring when people with equal abilities have different incomes because of unequal access to employment opportunities – which occurs both under adverse and compensatory-discrimination. The institutional background is that of India but the model and conclusions apply quite generally. I show how, in the presence of envy, adverse and compensatory discrimination both compromise efficiency and equity. Whether a population behind the veil of ignorance prefers adverse or compensatory discrimination depends on the choice between efficiency and equity (no-envy) in social outcomes.
People with disabilities (PWD) tend to experience less career success than their counterparts without a disability, and their talent and skill remain underutilized. Disability literature also outlines various barriers to careers of PWD. Yet there are those who successfully manage their careers. Our aim in the present interview-based study was to understand which strategies PWD engage in to manage their careers proactively. Findings indicate that strategies include maintaining a positive mind-set; trouncing competence stereotypes by sensitizing people to their ability through learning and applying new skills, and by seeking feedback; engaging in disability advocacy to remove performance myths; and building, leveraging, and contributing to disability networks.We noted gender and tenure differences with regard to strategies employed. Findings imply that career objectives of PWD are not those traditionally expected or lauded by organizations, and motivations for career self-management are unique to PWD as compared to those without a disability.
Data arising from life-testing and reliability studies are often left truncated and right censored. The lognormal, Weibull, gamma, and exponential are some probability distribution models which are most widely used to model lifetime data. The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a powerful tool for analyzing incomplete data, see McLachlan and Krishnan (2008) for details. Here, the likelihood inference via the EM algorithm is used to estimate the parameters of the lognormal, Weibull and gamma models based on left truncated and right censored data. The generalized gamma model is a parsimonious model that includes the lognormal, Weibull, exponential and gamma distributions as special cases. The EM algorithm steps for the generalized gamma distribution are also derived based on left truncated and right censored data. The asymptotic variances of the maximum likelihood estimates are derived by using the missing information principle of Louis (1982), and then the asymptotic confidence intervals for the parameters are obtained. The Newton-Raphson method is also applied to obtain the MLEs for the lognormal, Weibull and gamma distributions, for comparison purpose. The methods of inference are compared through extensive Monte Carlo simulation studies, and some numerical examples are given to illustrate all the methods of inference developed here. A model discrimination problem is addressed using the information-based criteria.
Despite the prevalence of exaggerated advertised reference prices (ARPs) in retail ads and the potential for consumer vulnerability to false reference prices, research identifying boundary conditions to the effectiveness of exaggerated ARPs is scarce. We demonstrate that exaggerated ARPs are much more effective in favorably influencing consumers' perceptions of retail offers when they feel time pressure while evaluating such offers. Further, although past research indicates that high promotion frequency weakens the effectiveness of exaggerated ARPs, we show that this is not observed when time pressure is present. We discuss the implications of this research and provide directions for future research.
The category of an organization frames, in important ways, its identity. Category change, therefore, poses a particularly thorny challenge to organizations as it requires organizations to reorient their identity in relation to a framework that is in flux. While category literature has focused extensively on category dynamics and its consequences for organizations, the question of how category change impacts organizational identities has received only limited attention. To shed light on this question, we investigate how political parties in Britain managed the challenge to their organizational identities when voters moved away from using ideological categories, such as Left, Center, Right, as the basis of party categorization. The political parties used a dual strategy to change their identity claims in response to the change in how they were categorized. On the one hand, they "looked backward" by emphasizing what they conceived of as the most core and popular elements of their identity, but on the other hand they also sought to expand their identity claims by imitating the claims by other parties. Identity expansion was, however, tempered by a concern to maintain the sanctity of their existing identity. When expanding their identity claims, political parties engaged in mimicry as well as symbolic adoption of issues of poor fit with the existing identity. The result was a meandering shift that did not readily correspond to audience expectations. Our paper contributes to the organizational category and identity literatures in organization theory and to the use of organization theory in understanding the dynamics of politics.
The aim of this study is to understand how gendered practices produce or counter inequalities in organization entry processes. Through a qualitative research methodology, this paper takes up the relatively neglected issue and unravels the interaction of gender with hiring related human resources practices through the voices of sixty eight Indian women working on diverse jobs and roles. This study shows that the workplace hiring related experiences of women are guided by their interface and interactions at both their social and work space informing about the variation in experiences of women across jobs and roles. It discusses the gender dilemmas experienced by women during their interactions at both these spaces rooted in the social constructions. The study also presents the responses and resolutions as displayed by these women to resolve their experiences of these gender dilemmas. The study grounded in the lived experiences of working women opens the platform for discussion to visualise the efforts of women to establish their working identity by gaining access to the work domain.
We study an investment problem faced by a risk-averse investor who has the option to invest in a risk-free asset (such as a bank account) and a risky asset. The wealth can be transferred between the two assets, and there are no transaction costs. The objective is to find an optimal time to exit the stock market that maximizes the expected discounted utility from terminal wealth. First, we address the problem when the wealth process is not subject to bankruptcy. Second, we consider the more realistic scenario where the investor's wealth is subject to bankruptcy. We model bankruptcy via a reduced form model in credit risk theory. In both cases, the optimal selling time is determined by a threshold for the wealth process. In particular, for the considered utility, we show that it is profitable to invest in a stock with a higher default intensity. We demonstrate for a given choice of drift and diffusion parameters that the optimal threshold and volatility exhibit a positive monotone relationship. We also show that an optimal portfolio process exists. Furthermore, numerical methods are utilized to study the relationship between the optimal decision threshold and the relevant policy variables.
Current research emphasizes institutions as the key driver of business group and affiliated firms' strategies in emerging economies. The institutions, it is argued, perpetuate past strategies owing to their slow to change characteristic. However, while not only do we have little empirical evidence to support this thesis, but also there is abundant research suggesting that firms adapt, modifying their strategy, when subjected to radical changes such as that being propelled by pro market reforms in emerging economies. This paper reconciles these two views by examining the strategic choices of business group affiliates and unaffiliated firms in response to the pro market reforms in India from 1991 onwards. Our findings, as opposed to the institutional determinism that undergirds much of extant literature, suggest an agentic view of affiliates as entities that are discernible of the environment conditions and calibrate their options before making choices. Furthermore, our findings contradict current view that strategic behavior of affiliates is similar to that of business groups. We observe that business groups and affiliates make distinct strategic choices during pro market reforms.
We discuss the problem of optimal walk-in admission policy at a diagnostic equipment clinic. The entire day is divided into slots of equal length corresponding to the scanning time which is assumed constant. Two types of patients arrive for service - those who have a scheduled appointment and walk-ins. All slots are booked for patients with an appointment, but some of them do not show up. The problem then is to dynamically decide the number of walk-in patients to admit given the number of remaining slots in the day. We formulate the problem as a dynamic program and prove that the optimal policy is an \admit-upto" policy similar to the order-upto policy in inventory management. Using this structure, we develop a heuristic admission policy that is similar in form to the optimal ordering policy for the classic news-vendor problem. We demonstrate that the heuristic policy performs very well through several computational experiments.
This research expands our knowledge of semantic cues and their impact on consumers' attitudinal perceptions. Specifically, we found that the sale rationale provided in a price promotion does not impact consumers' attitudinal responses in case of moderate discounts. However, in case of exaggerated discounts the consumers respond more positively to unique sale rationale rather than recurring sale rationale irrespective of the frequency of recurrence. This has significant implications for regulators such as the FTC. A recent survey of cases regarding "going out of business" sale indicates that a number of state attorney generals such as those in Colorado, Maryland, Washington, Ohio, and New Hampshire have been involved in litigation. In each of these, cases firms have used the sale rationale of "going out of business" too often or too long. Besides the FTC, the consumer protection act states that "conducting going out of business sales which last more than 60 days or which are held more than once every two years by the same owners of the business" are considered as unfair or deceptive advertising. Since the results of this research indicate that consumers have the most favorable attitudinal responses to a "going out of business" sale rationale in combination with implausible price discounts, it is important to monitor companies which misuse or abuse the claim "going out of business". Besides existing regulation, special tighter regulation may be needed in case of companies combining implausible price discounts with the "going out of business" sale rationale
Though it is well accepted that employees have multiple identities which change over time, little is known about how organizational identification changes and the factors that cause these changes. The study reported in this paper examined the dynamic relationships of organizational identification with psychological contract breach, and perceived organizational prestige during the period of early socialization of newcomers in an organization. This longitudinal research used data from 1346 newcomers in an Indian IT services organization over their early-socialization journey consisting of organizational orientation, technical training and initial project work. Using random coefficient modelling and regression analyses the study shows that change in psychological contract breach is significantly related to change in organizational identification and change in perceived organizational prestige is significantly related to change in organizational identification. The study also shows that psychological contract breach change and perceived organizational prestige change impact organizational identification changes independently. These findings provide new insights to researchers on the lesser known dynamics of organizational identification, psychological contract breach and perceived organizational prestige, while informing practitioners about improving identification through higher focus on fulfilling psychological contracts, and maintaining the perceived prestige of the organization.
The essence of a successful job is for an employee to be engaged in performing meaningful tasks. It may not be desirable for the employee to be engaged in tasks which are not valued or to be without any tasks. The impact of "idle time", a period where there is no meaningful task assigned to the employee, is relatively under-researched in spite of its significance. The current study uses longitudinal data from a total of 304 newcomers in an Indian information technology services organization during their early socialization. The data shows a marked decrease in the employees' psychological contract fulfilment and in organizational identification, as well as a decrease in perceived organizational prestige, during the period of the study. Further, the study shows that the decrease in psychological contract fulfilment was highly significant in the employees who were idle. These findings highlight the criticality of idle time on newcomers' initial attitudes.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, firms have started looking inwardly to create innovative ways to improve firm performance. Depending on financial resources alone may not help firms to grow in this environment. Some firms looking for creating value through the people resources are engaged in creating structured initiatives for capturing the heart of their employees. This paper focuses on those initiatives that help firms to tap these capabilities in ways leading to superior financial performance. In our study we consider a Middle East financial services firm which created a structured initiative after the financial meltdown. Using a survey based methodology and various rounds of interviews with the top management; we show that structured initiative leads to superior financial performance in the operating as well as financial parameters.
There is a pressing need to develop a workable model of corporate governance in emerging markets, given their different business practices, institutional infrastructure and cultures. It is only in recent times that Indian corporates have started viewing good corporate governance as a business necessity. While gender diversity of boards is an important dimension of corporate governance, there have been limited studies in this regard using Indian data. The present study is motivated by the need to extend research on impact of gender diverse boards, an integral element of corporate governance, in the Indian context. Specifically, the study investigates impact of gender wise heterogeneous boards on financial and social performance of Indian firms.The sample consists of 54 companies drawn from Economic Times ranking, 2011 spread over widely different industry segments, 38 of which belong to the private sector and 16 to the public sector. The study focuses on NSE listed companies because of easy accessibility of their annual reports and reliability of data pertaining to performance. The study uses Blau's diversity index to capture gender diversity of the Board. As regards financial performance, literature offers little unanimity on whether to use accounting based or market based parameters. By attempting to understand the interlinkage, this line of research is expected to provide useful insights into whether there is a business case for gender diverse corporate boards. Also, it seeks to address the issue of whether gender diverse corporate boards are an important element of long term sustainability of firms.
The performance of corporate brands is a very significant and key metric in gauging the degree of success of the respective firms. In a business-to-business setting, corporate brands are of even larger importance and greater relevance. From a strategic marketing perspective, this study looks at market orientation as a major antecedent to enhanced corporate brand performance. The presence of relationship orientation and innovativeness as two strategic marketing mediators affect the association that the study tries to establish between market orientation and corporate brand performance. In the backdrop of Indian B2B firms, a dyadic analysis is carried out to eke out the relationships between the two main and the two mediatory concepts. The analysis, done with a Bayesian paradigmatic approach, comes up with a linkage between corporate brand performance and market orientation under positive mediatory influences of innovativeness and relationship orientation.
The growing popularity of online dating sites is altering one of the most fundamental human activities, finding a date or a marriage partner.Online dating platforms offer new capabilities, such as extensive search, big-data based mate recommendations and varying levels of anonymity, whose parallels do not exist in the physical world. Yet, little is known about the causal effects of these new features.In this study we examine the impact of a particular anonymity feature, which is unique to online environments, on matching outcomes. This feature allows users to browse profiles of other users anonymously, in that they have the ability to check out a potential mate's profile and not leave any observable trail of doing that. While this may decrease search costs and allow users to search without inhibition, it also eliminates a "weak signal" for their potential mates. We run a randomized field experiment on a major North American online dating website, where 50,000 of 100,000 randomly selected new users are gifted the ability to view profiles of other users anonymously. Compared to the control group, the users treated with anonymity become disinhibited: they view more profiles, and are more likely to engage in viewing same sex and inter-racial mates. However, based on our analysis, we demonstrate causally that weak signaling is a key mechanism in achieving higher levels of matching outcomes. The treated users lose the ability to leave a weak-signal in the form of a profile view and, therefore, achieve fewer matches than their nonanonymous counterparts. This effect is significantly stronger for women, reflecting and quantifying the impact of an age-old social norm that prevents them from making the first move.
Even though it is well known that patients often arrive early and out of turn for scheduled appointments in outpatient clinics, no research has been undertaken to establish whether an idle provider should see an early patient right away (preempt) or wait for the patient scheduled next. In practice, this problem is typically resolved using a first-come-first-served policy, which consists of seeing the early patient. By contrast, we analytically determine the time intervals where it is optimal to preempt and those where it is optimal to wait. Our analysis indicates that the first-come-first-served policy is never optimal, although it is a good heuristic under certain circumstances, e.g. when overtime charges are high, appointment lengths are short, or if patients are likely to arrive very late. Compared to the first-come-first-served policy, our method dramatically reduces patient waiting times at the cost of a modest increase in overtime. Our results are obtained analytically and validated with simulated and empirical data. A software program is provided that clinics can readily use to solve the wait-preempt dilemma.
The present study focuses on the Visual elements as sensory inputs in organized retailing and constructs and validates a new scale called VISUALSCAPE to measure visual elements in organized retailing. The methodology suggested by Churchill (1979) for scale construction was used to assess content validity, construct validity and nomological validity of the scale. The data collection was through a survey with a structured questionnaire and structural equation modelling was used as the data analysis technique. The analysis resulted in a seven factor (22 items) VISUALSCAPE scale with the factors named as The factors were named as Displayscape, Themescape, Infrascape, Designscape, Signscape, Lightscape, Transcape. The present study has contributed to the literature on store atmospherics by constructing and validating the VISUALSCAPE scale to measure the visual elements of a physical retail store. It has empirically validated the role of Visual Elements on various aspects of customer experience such as browsing and shopping excitement. The practical contribution of the study is the construction of a tool to measure the Consumer Perception on various elements related to the sense of sight. The scale would allow the retailer to understand how consumers perceive visual elements of his/her store and could also act as a quality check to assess whether the retailer is performing well on the same. The present study has contributed to retailing research and practice by providing a new scale to measure visual elements in organized retailing.
This paper examines the effects of compensatory-discrimination policies in a caste-based segregated economy where some high-paid positions in a certain industry are reserved for low-caste insiders as a consequence of the implementation of the policies. Cultural attitudes towards preferences for work loving and leisure-loving traits evolve endogenously. The economy will converge to the efficient (inefficient) equilibrium with larger (smaller) fractions of work lovers among the insider and outsider populations if the profits in the industry with the purview of the reservation policy are sufficiently low (high) or the profits in the industry without the purview of the reservation policy are sufficiently high (low). Changes in the degree of compensatory-discrimination policies will affect the dynamics for insiders and outsiders differently.
There is a sequence of Geostatistical problems related to Arsenic contamination in groundwater. Some of them are relatively simpler like testing i] whether higher arsenic contamination is a severe phenomenon in water samples of recently installed tube wells, given that the average is about 0.17mg/L in tube wells installed before a given calendar year or ii] whether the distributions of Arsenic contamination in groundwater is symmetric bell shaped or having long right tail. On the other hand, there are complex problems like studying changes in Arsenic contamination pattern with changes in soil layers or the depth of the water sources or studying the effects of other covariates. Discriminating between possible patterns is another major challenge. More importantly, all these experiments involves huge cost and tax-payers' money. A major focus of our research is towards cost minimization through sequential sampling that effectively reduces required number of samples without compromising with the efficacy of the inferential results. In the present context, we shall discuss sequential-type nonparametric tests for multiple compariso ns pattern recognitions. We provide tests for the identity of several unknown univariate continuous distribution functions against patterned alternatives.
Environmental consciousness has become increasingly important in everyday life and business practice. The effort to reduce the impact of business activities on the environment has been labelled as green supply chain management. Any major greening project would require efforts on the part of the entire supply chain. However, very few studies have addressed the issue of coordinating the green supply chain. We consider the problem of coordination of a manufacturer and a retailer in a vertical supply chain, who put in efforts for 'greening' their operations. We address some pertinent questions in this regard such as extent of effort in greening of operations by manufacturer or retailer, level of cooperation between the two parties, and how to coordinate their operations in a supply chain. The greening efforts by the manufacturer and retailer result in demand expansion at the retail end. The decision variables of the manufacturer are wholesale price and greening effort, while those of the retailer are retail price and its greening effort. We find that the ratio of the optimal greening efforts put in by the manufacturer and retailer is equal to the ratio of their green sensitivity ratios and greening cost ratios. Further, profits and efforts are higher in the integrated channel as compared to the case of the decentralized channel. Finally, a two-part tariff contract is found to produce channel coordination in this problem. A numerical example illustrates the results.
