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626 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2017

Are small firms willing to pay for improved power supply? Evidence from a contingent valuation study in India

Ranjan Kumar Ghosh, Yugank Goyal, Jens Rommel, and Julian Sagebiel

Energy Policy

This paper provides new estimates on Indian small-scale manufacturing firms’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for reliable power supply. Almost half of Indian manufacturing lies in the small-scale sector, and its productivity is severely affected by power outages. However, there is a surprising paucity of research on small firms’ WTP for avoiding outages. We conduct a double-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation experiment with a random sample of 260 small-scale firms in the region around Hyderabad. We find that on average, firms are willing to pay approximately 20% more for uninterrupted power supply. The WTP estimates and the explanatory factors for the firms’ decisions were tested for robustness using both probit and bivariate probit models. In addition, a two-step Heckman correction was used to control for selection bias induced by protest responses. Our results are vital to understand behavior of small firms, which are crucial to India's economic growth. Further, the government's continued emphasis on power sector reforms makes the paper even more important as it provides realistic estimates for designing tariffs while keeping in mind the preferences of the small-scale industry.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Factors affecting Web 2.0 adoption: exploring the knowledge sharing and knowledge seeking aspects in health care professionals

Jang Bahadur Singh, Rajesh Chandwani, and Mayank Kumar

Journal of Knowledge Management

Purpose

This research aims to explore the factors that affect the adoption of Web 2.0 among knowledge workers. The research specifically investigated the role of factors related to both knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing, in the context of Web 2.0 use by health care professionals.

Design/methodology/approach

For this research, a cross-sectional survey design was adopted. The data were analyzed using the partial least square-structural equation modeling.

Findings

The results confirmed that the intention to adopt Web 2.0 depends upon both the knowledge-seeking and the knowledge-sharing attitudes. However, between the two, it is knowledge-sharing factors that are more important. Health care professionals tend to share knowledge driven by intrinsic motivators rather than by extrinsic motivators. On the other hand, knowledge-seeking attitude was determined by usefulness of knowledge and was not affected by the effort involved.

Research limitations/implications

All the respondents were health care professionals from India, and convenience sampling was used to reach them. This may limit the generalizability of the findings.

Practical implications

This research provides useful insights on implementing Web 2.0-based knowledge management systems, specifically for health care professionals. Particularly, it emphasizes the need to focus on reinforcing intrinsic motivators like self-efficacy and the joy of sharing.

Originality/value

It is perhaps the first study that integrates the factors related to knowledge sharing and seeking in a single theoretical model, thereby presents and tests a more realistic model of knowledge management.

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Journal Articles | 2017

India's E‐Waste Rules and Their Impact on E‐Waste Management Practices: A Case Study

Kalyan Bhaskar and Rama Mohana Turaga

Journal of Industrial Ecology

India, like many other developed and developing countries, has adopted an extended producer responsibility (EPR) approach for electronic waste (e-waste) management under its E-waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011. Under these rules, producers have been made responsible for setting up collection centers of e-waste and financing and organizing a system for environmentally sound management of e-waste. In this article, we use the implementation of these rules in Ahmedabad in western India as a case study to conduct a critical analysis of the implementation of India's Rules. Interviews of main stakeholder groups, including a sample of regulated commercial establishments, regulatory agencies enforcing the Rules, informal actors involved in waste collection and handling, as well as publicly available information on the implementation constitute data for our case study. Our results indicate that while there has been an increase in the formal waste processing capacity after the implementation of the Rules, only 5% to 15% of the total waste generated is likely channeled through formal processing facilities. While the EPR regulation forced the producers to take action on a few relatively inexpensive aspects of the Rules, the collection and recycling system has not been made convenient for the consumers to deposit e-waste in formal collection and recycling centers. Based on our findings, we argue that Indian EPR regulation should go beyond simple take-back mandates and consider implementing other policy instruments such as a deposit-refund system. An important implication for developing countries is the need for careful attention to instrument choice and design within EPR regulations.

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Journal Articles | 2017

High-performance work systems and creativity implementation: the role of psychological capital and psychological safety

Promila Agarwal and Elaine Farndale

Human Resource Management

Unimplemented creative ideas are potentially wasted opportunities for organisations. Although it is largely understood how to encourage creativity among employees, how to ensure this creativity is implemented remains underexplored. The objective of the current study is to identify the underlying mechanisms that explain the relationship between high-performance work systems and creativity implementation. Drawing from the job demands–resources model, we explore a model of psychological capital and psychological safety as mediators in the relationship between high-performance work systems and creativity implementation. Based on 505 employee survey responses, the findings show support for the mediating relationships, highlighting the importance of psychological mechanisms. The study has important implications for HRM, uncovering how people management practices can encourage creativity implementation in the workplace.

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Journal Articles | 2017

A two-echelon joint continuous-discrete location model

Prahalad Venkateshan, Ronald H. Ballou, Kamlesh Mathur, and Arulanantha P.P. Maruthasalam

European Journal of Operational Research

The problem of locating up to a given number of facilities in continuous Euclidean space that can serve as intermediate transshipment points between multiple stakeholders in a supply chain — suppliers and customers — who are distributed over the same space is considered. The first contribution is in considering the multisource Weber problem (MWP) in the presence of both source points and demand points rather than either alone. The second contribution is that the selection of intermediate facilities for further discrete analysis is based on a quantitative determination rather than a subjective selection process, which is typical of most popular commercial-grade mathematical programming (LP and IP) based location models. While the mathematical programming approach benefits from a degree of richness in features and a sense of computational optimization, one limitation is that the candidate locations to be evaluated must be specified, often without any computational basis for them. Computational experiments on randomly generated problem instances and real case studies indicate that significant gains can be achieved with relatively little effort by expanding the boundary of analysis to include multiple suppliers and multiple customers in the analysis and design of a supply chain network. An alternating location-allocation-type heuristic method is developed that is easy to implement. The third contribution is the development of two different lower bounding procedures that demonstrate the high quality of this obtained heuristic solution.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Gendered BoP hygiene markets in rural India: A case study of social entrepreneurship and social innovation

Sukhpal Singh

The Hong Kong Journal of Social Work

Water scarcity and non-existent or poor sanitation have special implications for the poor in a rural context of a developing country such as India, especially in the case of women due to their personal hygiene needs. The penetration of sanitary napkins is very low in Indian villages for reasons such as the high cost of branded napkins, availability, and cultural barriers. Over 88% of rural women use unhygienic alternatives during menstruation, with 77% using a piece of old cloth and many others nothing at all. These practices lead to a deterioration in health of the mother as well as the child and, sometimes, the death of the mother. Furthermore, a large proportion of girls in India do not go to school during their menstruation period, for an average of 4–5 days every month, and at least 23% of girls drop out of school when they start menstruating. Adult women cut down on their productive day-to-day activities. Menstruating lower-income women also have to follow certain social exclusion norms and treat it as a purely private matter as it is considered a social taboo. The access to personal reproductive hygiene products and services thus becomes indispensable in terms of addressing hygiene and sanitation needs. Furthermore, this is more of a developmental/social venture rather than just pure rural marketing. This paper examines the issue from a social enterprise and social innovation perspective in order to understand the issues involved in changing the situation. It examines the case of a social venture in India (Goonj) which has attempted to deal with this market in terms of its approach, product design, market creation, performance, issues faced, and impact made. The paper attempts to infer lessons for making social entrepreneurship and social innovations work in developing country health and hygiene contexts in the form of a Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) market solution.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Family deviance, self-control, deviant lifestyles, and youth violent victimization: A latent indirect effects analysis

Margit Wiesner and Kathan Shukla

Victims & Offenders

Research increasingly explores more complex relations of low self-control and context factors, such as structural constraints that limit behavioral lifestyle options, with violent victimization. The authors extend extant research by examining indirect effects of low self-control and family deviance on violent victimization via deviant lifestyles. The hypothesized full indirect effects model is tested for 233 African American and Hispanic 11th-grade students using latent variable analysis. Results offer strong support for the full indirect effects hypothesis. Results generally support the utility of an integrative framework that includes structural constraints arising from the family setting.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Constitutional mandate and judicial initiatives influencing Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programmes in India

M P Ram Mohan and Anvita Dulluri

Journal of Water Sanitation and Hygiene for Development

This paper undertakes a thorough review of the legislative and policy framework of water supply and sanitation in India within the larger backdrop of the universal affirmation of right to water and sanitation under the UN WASH initiatives, first articulated under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Recognizing the proactive role played by the Indian judiciary in this regard, the paper examines various patterns of judicial reasoning in realising the right to water and sanitation as Constitutional rights of citizens. The paper observes that through a consistent ‘rights-based’ approach, the Indian judiciary has systematically articulated and achieved the objectives of the UN WASH initiatives long before they were spelled out under the MDGs. The paper highlights the need for the Government to recognise and incorporate judicial insights in implementing developmental projects under the WASH initiatives.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Adaptive linguistic weighted aggregation operators in multi-criteria decision making

Manish Aggarwal

Applied Soft Computing

In this paper, we propose new aggregation operators for multi-criteria decision making under linguistic settings. The proposed operators are based on two sets of criteria weights. Besides the primary conventional criteria weights, we introduce a method to deduce secondary criteria weights from the criteria evaluations, which reflect the role of the different criteria in discriminating among the alternatives. The properties of the proposed operators are investigated. An approach for the application of the said operators in a group multi-criteria decision making problem is presented. Following the same, the proposed operators are applied in a case study on supplier selection. The empirical validation of the proposed operators is performed on a set of 12 real datasets.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Rough information set and its applications in decision making

Manish Aggarwal

IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems

The decision making in the real world is inevitably characterized with vagueness, and imprecision due to incomplete knowledge. To this end, we combine the information set with the rough set theory to represent both the vagueness and imprecision at the same time. We term the proposed structure as rough information set that has information sets based on fuzzy equivalence relations as its building blocks. The usefulness of the proposed structure is demonstrated through a case study in credit scoring analysis, and a biometrics application on knuckle-based recognition.

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