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Journal Articles | 2021

Performance implications of outsourcing: A meta-analysis

Somnath Lahiri, Amit Karna, Sai Chttaranjan Kalubandi, and Saneesh Edacherian

Journal of Business Research

Although outsourcing remains a dominant strategic choice for managers, the understanding of its implications on the firm remains inconclusive. In this paper we focus on empirical evidence around contingencies that determine whether and how outsourcing impacts firm performance. Specifically, we examine how type of value chain activity (core vs. non-core), industrial nature of activity (manufacturing vs. services), and provider’s location (domestic vs. international) impact performance. We conduct a meta-analysis of 121 samples from 106 primary studies spanning over 28 years (1992–2019). We find that outsourcing–firm performance relationship is positive. But more importantly, our results demonstrate that the association is stronger for non-core outsourcing than core outsourcing. Interestingly the outsourcing–firm performance relationship does not meaningfully vary across manufacturing and services outsourcing. Our results further indicate that the positive relationship is stronger for international outsourcing than domestic outsourcing. We discuss implications of our findings and present opportunities for future research.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Interfirm collaboration and exchange relationships: An agenda for future research

Sourav Bikash Borah, Girish Mallapragada, Raghu Bommaraju, Rajkumar Venkatesan, and Narongsak Thongpapanl

International Journal of Research in Marketing

Interfirm collaboration and exchange relationships are fundamental to how value is created, managed, and exchanged between firms. In this paper we first identify three major research themes (nature, governance, and outcomes) that existing research has focused on and then propose three structural shifts (technology, platforms, and globalization) that might influence nature, governance, and outcomes associated with interfirm collaboration. We also synthesize a research agenda for the future and develop multiple research propositions that might become the foundation to integrate the structural shifts into research on interfirm collaboration. We provide guidance on how existing theories can help scholars address new research questions arising due to the structural shifts. Finally, we provide insights to managers on the type of data that they need to access to make more effective decisions related to interfirm collaboration in a dynamic business environment.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Modelling driver's reactive strategies in e-hailing platforms: an agent-based simulation model and an approximate analytical model

Arulanantha Prabu P. M., Debjit Roy, and Prahalad Venkateshan

International Journal of Production Research

For an e-hailing taxi operation, we analyse a driver's profit-maximising reactive strategy (to either accept or refuse a ride request) in response to the ride request broadcast by the platform. We analyse four operating modes, each of which is a combination of either of two reactive strategies: no refusal and refusal based on proximity, and either of two broadcasting methods. In an operating mode, our objective is to evaluate the expected total profit in a shift. We adopt a two-stage methodology to answer the research questions. In the first stage, we develop an agent-based simulation model to capture the effect of multiple taxis on driver's reactive strategy. Using real trip data, we find that a driver could follow a strategy of refusal based on proximity and earn approximately 25% more than the baseline no refusal strategy. In the second stage, we develop an approximate analytical model for a single taxi operation and compare the performance against the agent-based simulation model. We develop closed-form expressions of the expected total profit for each operating mode and topology of the service region. We find that our approximate analytical model provides an upper bound, and the profit deviation lies within 20% of the agent-based simulation model.

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Journal Articles | 2021

From silos to synergies: A systematic review of luxury in marketing research

Amalesh Sharma, Mauli Soni, Sourav Bikash Borah, and Tanjum Haque

Journal of Business Research

The significant growth of luxury products and services and their marketing in the last three decades has fueled substantial research interest among scholars and practitioners investigating the various aspects of luxury. However, the existing literature lacks a comprehensive review that includes all possible aspects of luxury. This paper responds to this gap by systematically reviewing the studies on this subject to provide a macro picture to identify the existing state of research, potential synergies, differences, and direction for future research. This review includes articles from 34 journals, covering 125 articles in total. The paper finds that the research on luxury revolves around four major themes: branding, consumption drivers, counterfeits, and marketing strategy. The paper then integrates various studies into these themes, enabling it to provide key insights for each domain, while examining their research design permits the analysis of the industry, geography, and methodological approaches. The paper finds that there are multiple theoretical paradoxes in the existing literature. Luxury research requires theoretical integration, should use real-world data to generate insights, and pay attention towards managerially relevant problems. The paper synthesizes implications across studies, identifies overlap and replication, understands disagreements and issues, and outlines potential research areas.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Analysis and impact of COVID-19 disclosures: is IT-services different from others?

Adrija Majumdar and Pranav Singh

Industrial Management & Data Systems

Purpose

There is ambiguity regarding whether coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a boon or bane for the IT services industry. On the one hand, it has created opportunities, especially with the growth of collaborative technologies. On the other hand, many firms have reduced their IT budgets owing to the ongoing recession. This study explores how IT firms have assessed the risk of the pandemic in the early days and informed capital market participants. In addition, it examines the impact of such online disclosures on information asymmetry.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors analysed annual reports of publicly listed firms in the USA filed on the Securities and Exchange Commission website in 2020 and examined whether the disclosure scenario of technology firms was different from that of the other industries. Moreover, the risk sentiment of COVID-19-related disclosures was assessed by employing text analytics. Information asymmetry was measured using the bid–ask spread.

Findings

Overall, it was found that IT services firms were less likely to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic in their annual reports. Interestingly, it was observed that technology firms that chose to communicate about the pandemic had a lower incidence of words related to risks. Furthermore, communicating about COVID-19 in annual reports calms investors and improves the information asymmetry situation about the firm. Variation in the severity of the pandemic and the responses of state governments was controlled for by employing state-fixed effects in the empirical models.

Originality/value

The authors inform the literature on corporate disclosures and technology and highlight the importance of effectively communicating about the pandemic.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Impact of gendered participation in market-linked value-chains on economic outcomes: Evidence from India

Vivek Pandey, Hari K. Nagarajan, and Deepak Kumar

Food Policy

We combine the results of a laboratory experiment and survey of agricultural households to estimate the welfare impacts of a market-based intervention with links to value-chain. We investigate whether increased participation by women in such value-chains improves their relative bargaining power and therefore their ability to contribute to household welfare. We utilize the National Dairy Plan-I as an example to estimate pathways through which such interventions may affect household decision-making. We find that the program design significantly increased women’s relative bargaining power within the household, which acts as an important channel for enhancing women’s ability to contribute to household welfare through decision-making processes related to food, nutrition, branded food items, and child education. The instrumental variable estimates show that if value-chains are gender-neutral then direct program effects are significant but small. Participation in National Dairy Plan-I, on the other hand, improved women’s relative bargaining power, allowing them to make substantial contribution to welfare. We show that when women’s bargaining power mediates participation in value-chains, the nutrition elasticity rises from 0.26 to 0.94. While the impact on analytical ability (i.e., mathematics Z-score) is negligible in the absence of female agency, performance improves by 0.35σ when gendered element(s) of the program are allowed to act as a channel.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Elite vs. mass politics of sustainability transitions

Nicolas Schmid, Christopher Beaton, Florian Kern, Neil McCulloch, Anish Sugathan, and Johannes Urpelainen

Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions

While the past decade of transitions scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the centrality of politics, key questions on transition politics deserve further research. Here, we develop a heuristic framework from the discipline of political science that separates transition politics into the classic categories of interests, ideas, institutions, as well as elite and mass politics. Based on this framework, we conduct a review of existing transitions literature on politics. We find that some areas of our framework are better covered than others. For instance, while the institutional foundations of elite politics are relatively well researched, there are only few studies on interests and ideas in mass politics. In geographical and sectoral terms, research is biased toward energy transitions in Europe and North America. Based on our review, we map areas for future research we believe to be indispensable to better understand varieties of transition politics.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Gravity and depth of social media networks

Pritha Guha, Avijit Bansal, Apratim Guha, and Anindya S. Chakrabarti

Journal of Complex Networks

Structures of social media networks provide a composite view of dyadic connectivity across social actors, which reveals the spread of local and global influences of those actors in the network. Although social media network is a construct inferred from online activities, an underlying feature is that the actors also possess physical locational characteristics. Using a unique dataset from Facebook that provides a snapshot of the complete enumeration of county-to-county connectivity in the USA (in April 2016), we exploit these two dimensions viz. online connectivity and geographic distance between the counties, to establish a mapping between the two. We document two major results. First, social connectivity wanes as physical distance increases between county-pairs, signifying gravity-like behaviour found in economic activities like trade and migration. Two, a geometric projection of the network on a lower-dimensional space allows us to quantify depth of the nodes in the network with a well-defined metric. Clustering of this projected network reveals that the counties belonging to the same cluster tend to exhibit geographic proximity, a finding we quantify with regression-based analysis as well. Thus, our analysis of the social media networks demonstrates a unique relationship between physical spatial clustering and node connectivity-based clustering. Our work provides a novel characterization of geometric distance in the study of social network analysis, linking abstract network topology with its statistical properties.

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Journal Articles | 2021

Competitive hub location problem: Model and solution approaches

Richa Tiwari, Sachin Jayaswal, and Ankur Sinha

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological

In this paper, we study the hub location problem of an airline that wants to set up its hub and spoke network, in order to maximize its market share in a competitive market. The market share is maximized under the assumption that customers choose amongst competing airlines on the basis of utility provided by the respective airlines. We provide model formulations for the airline’s problem for two alternate network settings: one in the multiple allocation setting and another in the single allocation setting. Both these formulations are non-linear integer programs, which are intractable for most of the off-the-shelf commercial solvers. We propose two alternate approaches for each of the formulations to solve them optimally. The first among them is based on a mixed integer second order conic program reformulation, and the second uses Kelley’s cutting plane method within Lagrangian relaxation. On the basis of extensive numerical tests on well-known data-sets (CAB and AP), we conclude that the Kelley’s cutting plane within Lagrangian relaxation is computationally the best for both the single and multiple allocation settings, especially for large instances. We are able to solve instances upto 50 nodes from AP data-set within 120 and 10 minutes of CPU time for single and multiple allocation settings, respectively, which were unsolved by mixed integer second order cone based reformulation or Kelley’s cutting plane algorithm in the maximum allowed CPU time (3 hours for single allocation and 1 hour for multiple allocation).

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Journal Articles | 2021

Solving bilevel optimization problems using Kriging Approximations

Ankur Sinha and Vaseem Shaikh

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics

Bilevel optimization involves two levels of optimization, where one optimization problem is nested within the other. The structure of the problem often requires solving a large number of inner optimization problems that make these kinds of optimization problems expensive to solve. The reaction set mapping and the lower level optimal value function mapping are often used to reduce bilevel optimization problems to a single level; however, the mappings are not known a priori , and the need is to be estimated. Though there exist a few studies that rely on the estimation of these mappings, they are often applied to problems where one of these mappings has a known form, that is, piecewise linear, convex, etc. In this article, we utilize both these mappings together to solve general bilevel optimization problems without any assumptions on the structure of these mappings. Kriging approximations are created during the generations of an evolutionary algorithm, where the population members serve as the samples for creating the approximations. One of the important features of the proposed algorithm is the creation of an auxiliary optimization problem using the Kriging-based metamodel of the lower level optimal value function that solves an approximate relaxation of the bilevel optimization problem. The auxiliary problem when used for local search is able to accelerate the evolutionary algorithm toward the bilevel optimal solution. We perform experiments on two sets of test problems and a problem from the domain of control theory. Our experiments suggest that the approach is quite promising and can lead to substantial savings when solving bilevel optimization problems. The approach is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods that are available for solving bilevel problems, in particular, the savings in function evaluations for the lower level problem are substantial with the proposed approach.

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