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3669 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2024

Integrated inventory replenishment and online demand allocation decisions for an omnichannel retailer with ship-from-store strategy

Vishal Bansal, Arnab Bisi, Debjit Roy, Prahalad Venkateshan

Retailing has changed dramatically from single-channel brick-and-mortar stores to multi-channel and omnichannel retailers over the last few decades. Omnichannel retailers employ different strategies to integrate online and offline sales channels as well as order fulfillment processes. Among these strategies, the ship-from-store is the most popular and widely accepted among retailers. It enables retailers to use inventory from store locations to fulfill online demand. An omnichannel retailer with a distribution center and a retail store has to make important, interlinked decisions — (1) how much inventory to keep at the retail store, and (2) where to fulfill the online demand from and how much. In this work, we model the integrated inventory replenishment and online demand allocation decisions for an omnichannel retailer employing the ship-from-store strategy. We analyze this problem for both single-period and multi-period settings. We extend the analytical framework of the single-period problem by providing a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) formulation for the multi-period problem. Our findings suggest that for a single-period setting, decentralized inventory replenishment and demand allocation system maximizes the profit of the omnichannel retailer for low values of the incentive for fulfilling the online demand through store inventory, while for sufficiently high values of the incentive, a pooled system provides the optimal profit. An increment in the discount factor has the same effect on the optimal decisions in a multi-period setting as that of salvage value in a single-period setting for a given value of the incentive for the ship-from-store strategy. We also provide several extensions (such as cross selling, endogenous and correlated demand streams) of our analytical framework for the multi-period problem.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Can biofuels help achieve sustainable development goals in India? A systematic review

Prantika Das, Chandan Kumar Jha, Satyam Saxena, Ranjan Kumar Ghosh

Biofuels are expected to play a pivotal role in developing economies' transition towards net-zero emissions. However, their promotion can cause multifaceted sustainability concerns. National biofuel policies often align with the optimistic discourse surrounding biofuels but may lack comprehensive measures to simultaneously address all sustainability risks. This study conducts a systematic review to evaluate the sustainability performance of biofuels and examines their implications for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A total of 12 sustainability indicators were identified as economic, social, and environmental priorities. Biofuel linkages with 8 SDGs, 21 targets, and 22 indicators were mapped. The analysis revealed a wider coverage of sustainability impacts associated with biodiesel compared to ethanol feedstocks for India. Notably, the sustainability effects of biofuels exhibited considerable variability across different spatial scales. Irrespective of the biofuel types, negative sustainability outcomes were found to be associated with socio-economic indicators related to food security, livelihood, and income, and environmental indicators like land use. Positive sustainability effects were observed for environmental indicators like water and soil quality, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The study identifies policy gaps in addressing localized adverse effects of biofuels, emphasizing the need to align biofuel strategies with SDGs for more comprehensive and sustainable biofuel development in developing countries.

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Journal Articles | 2024

The Ethical, Societal, and Global Implications of Crowdsourcing Research.

Shuili Du, Mayowa T. Babalola, Premilla D’Cruz, Edina Dóci, Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Louise Hassan, Gazi Islam, Alexander Newman, Ernesto Noronha & Suzanne van Gils

Online crowdsourcing platforms have rapidly become a popular source of data collection. Despite the various advantages these platforms offer, there are substantial concerns regarding not only data validity issues, but also the ethical, societal, and global ramifications arising from the prevalent use of online crowdsourcing platforms. This paper seeks to expand the dialogue by examining both the “internal” aspects of crowdsourcing research practices, such as data quality issues, reporting transparency, and fair compensation, and the “external” aspects, in terms of how the widespread use of crowdsourcing data collection shapes the nature of scientific communities and our society in general. Online participants in research studies are informal workers who provide labor in exchange for remuneration. The paper thus highlights the need for researchers to consider the markedly different political, economic, and socio-cultural characteristics of the Global North and the Global South when undertaking crowdsourcing research involving an international sample; such consideration is crucial for both increasing research validity and mitigating societal inequities. We encourage researchers to scrutinize the value systems underlying this popular data collection research method and its associated ethical, societal, and global ramifications, as well as provide a set of recommendations regarding the use of crowdsourcing platforms.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Supply base concentration and firm innovation performance: A contingency study of supply base breadth, depth, dispersion, and collaboration

Amalesh Sharma, Anirban Adhikary, Sourav Bikash Borah, Surya Pathak

To survive in the current business environment, a firm must embrace ‘innovation’ in its overall business strategies. While scholars have investigated drivers of firms’ innovation performance, the concentration of a firm’s supply base and its potential link to innovation performance remains unexplored. We draw on the Knowledge-Based View (KBV) and the power asymmetry literature to propose that supply base concentration influences a firm’s innovation performance non-linearly, and that structure of the supply base in terms of breadth, depth, and geographical dispersion, and nature of the supply base in terms of collaboration moderate this relationship. Using data from 185 firms spanning six years and eleven industry sectors and implementing a robust empirical procedure that accounts for endogeneity and unobserved firm-level heterogeneity, we find that supply base concentration has an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovation performance. Moreover, breadth positively and geographical dispersion negatively influence this relationship. The results also show that supply base collaboration strengthens the relationship between concentration and innovation performance. Through multiple post hoc analyses, we also show partial empirical evidence of the theoretical mechanisms we propose. We contribute to the extant literature on supplier management, innovation performance, and the structure of the supply base.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Examining the relationships between instructional leadership, teacher self-efficacy and job satisfaction: a study of primary schools in India

Furkan Khan, Preeti, Vishal Gupta

Building on the social cognitive theory, a mediation model was examined to understand the role of teacher self-efficacy as the underlying mechanism for the relationship between instructional leadership and teacher job satisfaction.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Inequality and income mobility: The case of targeted and universal interventions in India

Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Abhinash Mishra, Mohsen Mohaghegh

Income interventions with pro-poor targeting is a common fiscal policy around the world. However their distributional effects on consumption and savings are not well understood. Motivated by the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), we use longitudinal data on income and consumption of Indian households to estimate distributional effects of such interventions in a model with endogenous consumption and savings distribution, where households face uninsured income risks. In the model, a standard scheme of interventions that consistently targets low-income cohorts, has small distributional impacts on targeted and non-targeted cohorts alike. In contrast, a fiscally-equivalent scheme that changes the expected income profile of the targeted households in the same initial cohort irrespective of their future incomes, generates larger effects by changing income mobility for both the targeted and non-targeted cohorts. This mobility-based channel generates consumption responses even though the magnitude of the shock is lesser for the initially targeted cohort, as it more than offsets the effect from permanent income shock. Quantitatively, such an intervention in the order of 0.6 percent of output, approximating the Indian scenario, increases consumption share of the targeted cohort by nearly 2.5 percent, five times as large as the effect of standard interventions. The distributional effects are similar to those arising from a counterfactual policy of universal basic income.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Role of resource investment management and strategic resource deployment capabilities in internationalization-performance relationship

Anish Purkayastha, Amit Karna, Sunil Sharma, Dhiman Badra

The performance implications of internationalization have been a matter of debate in management literature for decades. Similar to developed market multinational enterprises (DMNEs), scholars found that emerging-market internationalizing firms (EMIFs) have initial costs and subsequent benefits of internationalization such that internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship is U-shaped. Emergingness of EMIFs gives us the opportunity to theorize how these internationalizing firms develop novel capabilities relevant to their state of evolution and resource conditions. Relying on resource management theory, we propose two capabilities – management of R&D investments (RIM) to balance between market and resource seeking motivations and re-deployment of strategic resources (SRD) to catch-up with the competitors. We use 20 years data from 837 Indian firms to empirically test whether the proposed capabilities steepen the I-P relationship and shift the turning point of the U-shaped curve to left. We find empirical support for our hypotheses, and thereby contribute to the literature on resource management in EMIFs and empirical analysis of non-linear relationship.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Social media “stars” vs “the ordinary” me: influencer marketing and the role of self-discrepancies, perceived homophily, authenticity, self-acceptance and mindfulness

Shehzala, Anand Kumar Jaiswal, Vidya Vemireddy, Federica Angeli

Social media influencers have become constant companions of a large audience of young consumers, but a crucial yet underexplored area of examination relates to the implications of exposure to influencers for an individual’s self-concept. This study aims to examine if and how individuals experience self-discrepancies when exposed to influencers and the impact of such discrepancies on their affect, cognition and behaviors toward the influencers and the brands they endorse.

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Journal Articles | 2024

An analysis of the dual burden of childhood stunting and wasting in Myanmar: a copula geoadditive modelling approach

Dhiman Badra

To analyse the spatial variation and risk factors of the dual burden of childhood stunting and wasting in Myanmar.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Have a Nice Flight! Understanding the Interplay Between Topics and Emotions in Reviews of Luxury Airlines in the Pre- and Post-Covid-19 Periods

Masoud Shayganmehr, Indranil Bose

Few studies assessed the impact of Covid-19 on the aviation industry from the passengers’ perspective. This study examined how airline passengers’ emotions (positive and negative) and sub-emotions (joy, trust, surprise, anticipation, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust) changed in the pre-and post-Covid-19 periods. 21,463 reviews from 2014–2022 of top 10 luxury airlines were extracted from Skytrax. Using the lens of the Appraisal Theory of Emotion, the analysis revealed an increase in negative emotion and related sub-emotions after the pandemic. Using topic modeling seven similar topics (namely food, staff, customer service, board, flight, crew, and luggage) and four dissimilar topics (entertainment and drink for pre-Covid-19 and wait and Covid-19 for post-Covid-19) were identified. Regression analysis showed that the topics food and entertainment generated significant positive emotion whereas wait and customer service generated significant negative emotion. The results would help the luxury airlines to identify offerings to improve during the recovery after Covid-19.

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