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3819 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2018

Efficiently mining high utility itemsets with negative unit profits

Srikumar Krishnamoorthy

Knowledge-Based Systems

A High Utility Itemset (HUI) mining is an important problem in the data mining literature that considers utilities of items (such as profits and margins) to discover interesting patterns from transactional databases. Several data structures, pruning strategies and algorithms have been proposed in the literature to efficiently mine high utility itemsets. Most of these works, however, do not consider itemsets with negative unit profits that provide greater flexibility to a decision maker to determine profitable itemsets. This paper aims to advance the state-of-the-art and presents a generalized high utility mining (GHUM) method that considers both positive and negative unit profits. The proposed method uses a simplified utility-list data structure for storing itemset information during the mining process. The paper also introduces a novel utility based anti-monotonic property to improve the performance of HUI mining. Furthermore, GHUM adapts key pruning strategies from the basic HUI mining literature and presents new pruning strategies to significantly improve the performance of mining. The proposed method is evaluated on a set of benchmark sparse and dense datasets and compared against a state-of-the-art method. Rigorous experimental evaluation is performed and implications of the key findings are also presented. In general, GHUM was found to deliver more than an order of magnitude improvement at a fraction of the memory over the state-of-the-art FHN method.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Geographic mobility of recent immigrants and urban transit demand in the U.S.: New evidence and planning implications

Sandip Chakrabarti and Gary Painter

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

Residential mobility rates in the U.S. have been in steady decline. Most notably, between 2005 and 2013, one-year intercity migration rate for immigrants has decreased by 0.7 percentage-points, compared to a 0.2 percentage-point decline for the U.S.-born population. Literature on urban implications of geographic mobility suggests that consideration of migration trends, or population flows, can improve urban planning, including transportation. Our research focuses on recent immigrants, a group that significantly contributes to public transit ridership in the U.S. In this study, we analyze the influence of the annual average in-migration rate of recent immigrants to various urban areas from within the country on transit ridership changes across the urban areas between 2008 and 2013. We also compare this effect with the effect of annual average in-migration rate of new immigrants to various urban areas from foreign countries. While the average effect of inflow of new foreign migrants on transit demand is suggested in the literature, distinguishing the transit demand of immigrants that are not movers and those that are movers from various locations remains unexplored.

We derive migration flows from the American Community Survey microdata, and transit ridership from the U.S. National Transit Database. We perform geospatial analysis to overcome several constraints that make exploration of the migration-transportation connection difficult, particularly the lack of uniformity in geographic boundaries used for data presentation across and within government agencies, and over time.

Our results indicate that consideration of domestic in-migration rates of recent immigrants can improve transit demand forecasting. As past literature has found, recent immigrants are highly likely to use transit. Recent immigrant migrants that have arrived directly from another country are even more likely to use transit. Interestingly, recent immigrants that move to a metropolitan area from another location in the U.S. are relatively less likely to use transit. Among domestic migrants, however, those that move to cities undergoing large increase in transit service relative to population are more likely to use transit. High population and transit stop density of both previous and current cities seem to positively affect transit mode choice for commute trips of recent immigrant movers. Declining inter-urban mobility among recent immigrants can indeed alter future transit demand trends. Transit agencies should not treat recent immigrants as a monolithic group. Consideration of the migration patterns of various types of recent immigrants, and factors that determine those patterns, can improve demand forecasting and planning.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Food value chain investments and the small farmer linkage: Indian experience, potential, and policy

Sukhpal Singh

World Food Policy

The agri-food value chains in the developing world are evolving fast due to many changes in policy and practice. In India, modern domestic food supermarkets have been present for more than 15 years now. Furthermore, in late 2012, foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail trade, including food, was permitted up to 51% of equity with other conditions of investment and operations. This paper tries to understand the role of investment (both domestic and foreign) in food/fibre value chains in improving the farmer/producer linkage. It uses empirical evidence from the experience of Indian domestic food retail supermarkets, and (mostly) foreign investment-based wholesale supermarkets in India, to examine the role such investments can play. It specifically examines the role and implications of investments in supermarkets for farmer income improvement, from a value chain perspective. It also explores various mechanisms which could be used to leverage the presence of such investments in food supermarkets and analyses the role of policy and regulation to promote/protect the small producer interests in food markets.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Land and livelihoods in rural India: Does farm size matter?

Sukhpal Singh

Indian Journal of Agricultural Marketing

This paper examines the question of role of land in rural livelihoods and that of small farms in the Indian smallholder and large landlessness context by focusing on the issue of size of the farm. It reviews evidence on the changing profile of farms globally and in India from the perspective of small and landless farmers. The paper argues that the size of the farm is not an issue for modern and sustainable agriculture and makes inferences about managing land in a sustainable way, including institutional approaches like group approaches and contract farming, from a smallholder and farm worker perspective.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Promoting and managing FPOs in India for efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability: Challenges, policies and best practices

Sukhpal Singh

Cooperative Perspective, Spl Issue(September)

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Journal Articles | 2018

Nocebo effects from negative product information: when information hurts, paying money could heal

Sukhpal Singh and Arvind Sahay

Journal of Consumer marketing

Purpose

This research aimed to find whether information about a product can give rise to negative perceptions even in inert situations (nocebo effects), and to understand how price levels impact such judgments.

Design/methodology/approach

In all experiments, participants were exposed to negative product information in the form of potential side-effects. In an initial study, a higher non-discounted versus a discounted price frame was presented for a health drink after customers were exposed to negative aspects. Then, in experiment 1, price (high vs low) and exposure to information (no information vs negative information) was manipulated for skin creams where participants physically evaluated the cream. In experiment 2, price was manipulated at three levels (low, high, discounted) orthogonally with product information (no negative information vs with negative information) to get a more nuanced understanding.

Findings

In the initial study, after exposure to negative information, the non-discounted group had more positive ratings for the drink. Study 1 showed that reading about negative information resulted in a nocebo effect on perception of dryness (side-effect). Moreover, when no information was presented, perception of dryness by low and high price groups were similar but in the face of negative information, perception of dryness by low-price group was more pronounced compared to a high-price group. Study 2 conceptually replicated the effect and also confirmed that not only discounts (commonly linked with product quality), but absolute price levels also show a similar effect.

Practical implications

Nocebo effects have been rarely documented in consumer research. This research showed how simply reading generically about potential side effects gives rise to nocebo effects. In addition, even though marketers might find it tempting to lower prices when there is negative information about certain product categories, such an action could backfire.

Originality/value

To the best of our knowledge, the link between observable nocebo effects and its link with pricing actions is a novel research thread. We were able to show a nocebo effect on product perception after reading about negative information and also find that a higher price can mitigate the nocebo effect to some extent.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Digital social media: Enabling performance quality of Indian Railways

Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Journal of Public Affairs

Indian Railways (IR) is the single largest organization that manages and operates a mammoth of transportation services in the World's largest democracy. IR services are operated through 7,137 stations, a route length of 66,030 km, and a total track of 117,996 km. The number of passengers carried every day is 23 million with passenger earnings of INR 42190 crores. Scale of operations translates to humungous everyday challenges. Quite understandably, customer dissatisfaction is prevalent, in spite of subsidized travel fares and multiple initiatives. In recent times, IR has become very active in the digital social media space to provide real-time and dynamic service improvements. In this talk, we will be discussing the beginning of technology intervention in IR, managerial challenges in exploiting technology advancements, and the current status in managing a large-scale public transport operations. We will also discuss about the insights, deployability in comparative segments, and the way forward.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Water ATMs of Indian Railways: Causing a silent revolution

Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers

The case discusses the red tape in the installation and operationalising of automatic water vending machines (AWVMs or popularly, water ATMs) in the railway stations on behalf of the Indian Railways (IR) from the perspectives of the protagonist Mr Siya Ram. Siya Ram is the group general manager of the ‘Rail Neer’ initiative of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a Government of India enterprise. Rail Neer is the bottled water brand of IRCTC.

The case deals with the product development and project execution of installing water ATMs in Indian railway stations. The project was conceptualized as early as 2007; nearly 50 water ATMs were installed in several railway stations, but the project was soon declared closed due to numerous operational hurdles. The Ministry of Railways (MoR) revived the project in 2015 and assigned IRCTC to install water ATMs in 7,500 stations. After the due process, IRCTC empanelled a set of qualified vendors to install the water ATMs; but the overall progress of commissioning and operationalizing was far from impressive. There were huge delays and hiccups, which had commercial implications for the vendors. Therefore, vendors were likely to be discouraged and could choose to not engage any further in the project. According to Mr Siya Ram, the fundamental issue was the delay in roll out of water ATMs arising due to lack of coordination between the vendors, station superintends, and IRCTC. How he attempts to resolve the issue is the focus of the case.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Functioning of Boards in PSBs in India

Sunil Kumar Maheshwari and Ramesh Bhat

Indian Journal of Industrial Relations

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Journal Articles | 2018

The Teaching of Soft Communication Skills in Entrepreneurship Development Courses at the+ 2 Level in India

Sushmita Chakravarti and Saikat Chakraborty

IUP Journal of Soft Skills

Entrepreneurs play an important role in the economic development of emerging economies such as India, and Entrepreneurship Development Programs (EDP) at various life stages boost it. EDP’s impact at the +2 level is strategic and timely as it adds self-sufficiency to the young who are either forced to or willingly take up entrepreneurship after their +2 education. Creating a new venture and the sea of uncertainties and risks involved in entrepreneurship can be daunting and frustrating, testing the tenacity of the +2 students’ soft skills, especially soft communication skills. Soft communication skill helps in information gathering, customer handling, teamwork, communicating with stakeholders, establishing relationships, and in tackling the challenges involved in venture creation. This paper thus argues for the teaching of soft communication skills in entrepreneurship development courses at the + 2 level, and highlights the need for and benefits of taking such initiatives, whilst suggesting certain broad guidelines in this regard.

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IIMA