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2769 items in total found

Working Papers | 2005

What's Keeping the Apples Away? Addressing the Market Integration Issue

Satish Y. Deodhar

Apples have been grown in India for a century. At present apple production exceeds 1.4 million tonnes a year. Still, there are wide variations in the apple prices across the country. We test the price data for market integration using cointegration and error correction methodology. Delhi, the major wholesale market for apples, does not seem to influence other markets. Mumbai market does influence Bangalore market, although with about a two week lag. Absence of integration can be attributed to traders from southern region bypassing the Delhi wholesale market, cascading effect of trader margins at various distribution points, absence of competition to agricultural produce marketing committee markets, and, inadequacy of road and cool chain infrastructure.

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Working Papers | 2005

A Process Oriented Approach to Waiting Line Management in a Large Pilgrimage Center in India: A Case Study

N. Ravichandran and Rao Subba I V

This article documents an innovative approach to manage waiting line in the largest pilgrimage center in the world. By a judicious combination of process orientation and advances in Information Technology, the pilgrimage center's management has been able to dramatically change the pilgrims waiting experience. The pilgrimage location under study is Tirumala located in Andhra Pradesh state in India. The number of visitors to this important location has been steadily increasing over time. As of 2005, the location attracted approximately 16 million visitors a year. The primary objective of a pilgrim visiting Tirumala is to have darshan of the principle deity in the temple. The secondary objectives include tonsure (shaving head as a mark of respect), offering donations, prasad collection, local sight seeing and shopping. The immense popularity of the temple and its location poses significant challenges to the management of the system. This temple is a tradition bound Institution. Therefore, some alternatives to resolve pilgrim waiting time are feasible and some are not. There are some hard constraints which may not stand the test of logic. The ability to manage the traffic volume is a function of processing rate (darshan duration) at the temple and darshan time available per day. This case study is an example of improving operational effectiveness by using formal management methods in addressing an important real life problem in an under researched area.

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Working Papers | 2005

Trade Cost, Trade Policy and Trade Volume: A Study of Indian Apple Market

Satish Y. Deodhar

Trade Cost form a significant part of moving goods from producer to consumer. These cost are particularly high in developing countries. As a representative country, we look at India's apple trade. Although tariff on apple imports is high, local distribution cost are much higher. While Tariff reduction will somewhat benefit the consumer, liberalization that promotes lowering of traders' margins may facilitate high-volume, low-margin trade. Trade cost may come down if uncertainty regarding phytosanitary norms goes down and infrastructure investments in cold chain and retails chains pick up. Ceteris paribus, it is expected that demand for imported apples could reach 70,000 tonnes per year in a decade.

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Working Papers | 2005

Format Choice of Food and Grocery Retailers

Piyush Kumar Sinha, Mathew Elizabeth, and Kansal Ankur

Format choice is recognized as a cognitive process. Like any other purchasing decision format choice also is an information processing behavior. A store is chosen based on the confidence that the customer has regarding the store; about the nature and quality of product and service he will receive. In Indian scenario formats have been found to be influencing the choice of store as well as orientation of the shoppers (Sinha and Uniyal, 2005). This study seeks to analyze the various factors influencing decision making process of customers in choosing a store format. A full-profile* procedure was used for the Conjoint Analysis in this study. The exploratory study brought out five different formats that existed in the food and grocery sector. With this it also identified combinations of the seven parameters have given rise to some generic retail formats. It also helped identifying the important factor set which affects consumer format choice decisions. The findings also provide details useful for retailers in designing an efficient retail package to offer their customers. * Full-profile conjoint analysis has been a popular approach to measure attribute utilities. In the full-profile conjoint task, different product descriptions (or even different actual products) are developed and presented to the respondent for acceptability or preference evaluations. Each product profile is designed as part of a fractional factorial experimental design that evenly matches the occurrence of each attribute with all other attributes. By controlling the attribute pairings, the researcher can estimate the respondent's utility for each level of each attribute tested.

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Working Papers | 2005

Health System in India: Opportunities and Challenges for Improvements

K. V. Ramani and Dileep Mavalankar

Health and Socio-economic developments are so closely intertwined that is impossible to achieve one without the other. While the economic development in India has been gaining momentum over the last decade, our health system is at crossroads today. Even though Government initiatives in public health have recorded some noteworthy successes over time, the Indian health system is ranked 118 among 191 WHO member countries on overall health performance. Building Health Systems that are responsive to community needs, particularly for the poor, requires politically difficult and administratively demanding choices. Health is a priority goal in its own right, as well as a central input into economic development and poverty reduction. Health sector is complex with multiple goals, multiple products, and different beneficiaries. India is well placed now to develop a uniquely Indian set of health sector reforms to enable the health system in meeting the increasing expectations of its users and staff. Managerial challenges are many to ensure availability, access, affordability, and equity in delivering health services to meet the community needs efficiently and effectively. In this working paper, we describe the status of our health system, discuss critical areas of management concerns, suggest a few health sector reform measures, and conclude by identifying the roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders for building health systems that are responsive to the community needs, particularly for the poor.

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Working Papers | 2005

Labour Reforms: A Delicate Act of Balancing the Interests

Kaur Rupinder and Sunil Kumar Maheshwari

In this study we examine the issue of the need of labour reforms in the globalised economy. The two legislations discussed in detail are: Chapter VB of Industrial Disputes Act, 1947- provisions relating to layoff, retrenchment and closure of industrial establishments and provisions regarding abolition and regulation of contract labour in Contract Labour (Regulations and Abolition) Act, 1970. We have dealt the issue from multiple stakeholder (Trade Unions, Employers, Political Parties and the Government) point of view. We have listed their interests and the respective positions taken by them. Based on these observations, we have made certain suggestions and emphasized the need to take the balanced view and build consensus in the larger interests of the stakeholders.

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Working Papers | 2005

Privacy Violation and Detection Using Pattern Mining Techniques

Bhattacharya Jaijit, Rajanish Dass, Kapoor Vishal, Chakraborti Debamitro, and Gupta S K

Privacy, its violations and techniques to bypass privacy violation have grabbed the centre-stage of both academia and industry in recent months. Corporations worldwide have become conscious of the implications of privacy violation and its impact on them and to other stakeholders. Moreover, nations across the world are coming out with privacy protecting legislations to prevent data privacy violations. Such legislations however expose organizations to the issues of intentional or unintentional violation of privacy data. A violation by either malicious external hackers or by internal employees can expose the organizations to costly litigations. In this paper, we propose PRIVDAM; a data mining based intelligent architecture of a Privacy Violation Detection and Monitoring system whose purpose is to detect possible privacy violations and to prevent them in the future. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is scalable and robust and that it can detect privacy violations or chances of violations quite accurately. Please contact the author for full text at rajanish@iima.ac.in

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Working Papers | 2005

Using Qualitative and Quantitative Methods to Investigate Patterns in Marketing Channels and International Marketing Strategies

Prathap Oburai and Kok Wai Chew

Changed agenda and paradigms require marketing's research methods and tools of enquiry to reflect fully the need to intensify theory-building programmes. We examine the evolution of the case research strategy in the context of business markets and inter-organisational relations, and submit that there is marked convergence of its underlying methodological and philosophical perspectives. Given that marrying qualitative and quantitative is a strategy endorsed by several eminent researchers, we apply mixed method approach to studying two significant phenomena viz. marketing channels and international marketing strategies. We adopt a mix of case research, grounded theoretic research methodologies and multivariate multidimensional mapping techniques for exploring both the subject areas. The first study offers a classification scheme for grouping marketing channels observed across thirteen industries into five homogenous clusters. The second study investigates the international marketing strategies adopted in twelve different business sectors in India. This study identifies several elements of international marketing strategies that may have the potential to affect business outcomes across sectors. In this paper, a case is made to promote the use of innovative and novel combinations of research methodologies to derive new insights of business phenomena.

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Working Papers | 2005

Determinants of Cellular Competition in Asia

Chakravarty Sujoy

Using data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Database I explore the market for the provision of cellular services in Asia. This study looks at the diffusion of mobile technologies and mobile tariffs over the last decade. It compares the degree of competition, regulation and its effects in Asia with mobile markets in developed countries. It also analyses a 29 country 10 year panel data set in order to study the determinants of mobile penetration in Asia. The results indicate that competition has played a major role in increasing the diffusion of cell phones. The presence of an independent telecommunication regulator as well as increasing capacity of fixed line telephone exchanges has also positively affected the diffusion of mobile services. The last part of the study takes a brief look at the cellular market in India, where mobile service provision has seen startling growth in the last decade. This growth has made for falling tariffs, increase in the number of firms and technologies and a large subscriber base which is still growing at a significant rate. The structure of competition is explored in some detail for regional markets using monthly data from 1997 to 2004.

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Working Papers | 2005

Conditions in Which Microfinance has Emerged in Certain Regions and Consequent Policy Implications

Sriram M S and Kumar Radha

The paper looks at some macro data on the availability of infrastructure, economic growth, density of population and the availability of formal financial services to examine if any of these factors explain the growth of microfinance in certain regions, while the other regions lag behind. For the study, data from the four southern states and three states from the western part of the country have been examined. We find that most of the indicators are not significant enough to explain the regional disparity in the growth of microfinance. However, anecdotal evidence and a perusal of the state policy pronouncements explain that the role of the state could be significant in promoting some of these initiatives. In case of Karnataka, we also find that the banking system seems to have played an additional role in rolling out microfinancial services. The paper concludes by indicating that possibly the sector is still insignificant in the rural economy to establish causality with macro variables. However, there could be possibility of growth in states like Rajasthan where most of the parameters that could foster microfinance seem to exist and with policy intervention on the routing of developmental projects, the movement could get a big boost. We also indicate that the existing network has the potential of unleashing more finance and financial products, and that initiative should be seized forthwith.

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