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Journal Articles | 2020

Money, land or self-employment? Understanding preference heterogeneity in landowners’ choices for compensation under land acquisition in India

Vikram Patil, Ranjan Ghosh, Vinish Kathuria, and Katharine N.Farrell

Land Use Policy

Land acquisition policies, upon which future land use patterns in India depend, are controversially tied to the question of whether to provide monetary or non-monetary compensation to affected landowners. However, turning to the preferences of landowners for answers only serves to complicate matters, as these are not homogenous on the question. This implies there is a need to identify the underlying factors giving rise to this preference heterogeneity, in order to develop more effective and efficient policy. This paper aims to address this gap using a contingent ranking experiment to study landowner disposition toward a range of compensation options, presented in a survey conducted in an ‘about-to-be-submerged’ region of a large, multi-stage irrigation project in India. Rankings were based on a selection of six compensation options, constituting different combinations of the attributes - cash, land, housing and self-employment. While the results suggest that landowners generally prefer non-monetary compensation, both the size of landholding and level of education of the landholder appear to influence the preferences for different compensation options. We find that landowners with more land or education tended to favour monetary compensation, while those with lower education or less land tended to favour housing and self-employment options. We close the text by exploring possible explanations for this specific form of heterogeneity, including access to information, to networks and capacities for income generation, and providing some reflections on the implications of these results for ensuring that rehabilitation and resettlement policies are both well targeted and effective.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Evaluating adolescents’ responses to internet ads: Role of ad skepticism, internet literacy, and parental mediation

Meng-Hsien (Jenny) Lin, Russell N. Laczniak, and Akshaya Vijayalakshmi

Journal of Advertising

In this article, we first compare adolescents’ responses to two formats (easily recognizable versus not easily recognizable) Internet ads. We find that Internet literacy and ad skepticism are necessary for adolescents to effectively apply persuasion knowledge to identify both ad formats. Second, we demonstrate that parental mediation and parents’ levels of Internet skills are critical for children’s development of Internet literacy. As a result, this article advances our understanding of adolescents’ responses to different Internet ad formats and the influential role of parental mediation in facilitating children’s development of such skills.

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Journal Articles | 2020

AGV or lift-AGV? Performance trade-offs and design insights for container terminals with robotized transport vehicle technology

Govind Lal Kumawat and Debjit Roy

IISE Transactions

New container terminals are embracing robotized transport vehicles such as lift-automated guided vehicles (LAGVs) and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to enhance the terminal throughput capacity. Although LAGVs have a high container handling time, they require less coordination with other terminal equipment in comparison with AGVs. In contrast, AGVs are hard-coupled resources, require less container handling times, but operate with high coordination delays in comparison with LAGVs. The effect of such operational trade-offs on terminal performance under various design parameter settings, such as yard block layout and a number of resources, is not well understood and needs to be evaluated at the terminal design phase. To analyze these trade-offs, we develop stylized semi-open queuing network models, which consist of two-phase servers and finite capacity queues. We develop a novel network decomposition method for solving the proposed queuing models. The accuracy of the solution method is validated using detailed simulation models. Using the analytical models, we study the performance trade-offs between the transport vehicle choices: LAGVs and AGVs. Our results show that the throughput capacity of the terminal in the container unloading process increases by up to 16% if LAGVs are chosen as transport vehicles instead of AGVs. However, at certain parameter settings, specifically, when the arrival rate of containers is low, the throughput time performance of the terminal is higher (up to 8%) with AGVs than with LAGVs. We also derive insights on the yard block layout and the technology choice for quay cranes.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Insolvency regimes and firms' default risk under economic uncertainty and shocks

Balagopal, Gopalakrishnan, and Sanket Mohapatra

Economic Modelling

One of the arguments often advanced for implementing a stronger insolvency and bankruptcy framework is that it enhances credit discipline among firms. Using a large cross-country firm-level dataset, we empirically test whether a stronger insolvency regime reduces firms' likelihood of defaulting on their debt. In particular, we examine whether it reduces default risk during increased economic uncertainty and various external shocks. Our results confirm that a stronger insolvency regime moderates the adverse effects of economic shocks on firms' default risk. The effects are more pronounced for firms in the top half of the size distribution. We also explore channels through which improved creditor rights influence firms' default risk, including dependence on external finance, corporate leverage, and managerial ethics. Our main results are robust to an alternative measure of default risk, inclusion of currency and sovereign debt crisis episodes, and alternative estimations.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Apartment buyers as financial creditors: Pushing the conceptual limits of the Indian insolvency regime

M P Ram Mohan and Vishakha Raj

Columbia Journal of Asian Law

A unique feature of the Indian insolvency regime is its
classification of debt into “operational” and “financial” debt. In
Swiss Ribbons v. Union of India, the Supreme Court of India
tenaciously upheld the difference between operational and
financial creditors and declared this classification constitutionally
valid. Last year, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC)
was amended to include amounts raised from allottees (persons to
whom an apartment or plot in a real estate project has been
allotted) within the definition of “financial debt,” thus making
allottees financial creditors. Though the amendment was passed to
empower allottees in India’s real estate sector, it revived a more
general discussion on the characteristics of operational and
financial creditors.
This paper posits that the amendment was enacted at the
cost of stretching the definition of “financial creditor” beyond its
conceptual limit and interfering with the IBC’s insolvency
resolution mechanism. We use the United States’ and the United
Kingdom’s insolvency regimes as a point of reference for
ascertaining the role of creditors in insolvency proceedings and
whether operationalizing the insolvency regime to solve problems
in a particular sector is justified.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Covid-19′s impact on supply chain decisions: Strategic insights from NASDAQ 100 firms using Twitter data

Amalesh Sharma, Anirban Adhikary, and Sourav Bikash Borah

Journal of Business Research

The coronavirus pandemic is having a clear impact on the supply chains of virtually all manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers. As the world attempts to navigate through this difficult time, most companies are struggling to maintain a steady flow of required goods and services. Whether it is frozen foods and grocery items (i.e., toilet papers), or ventilators and masks, or even the services (i.e., clinic visits), the supply chain has been facing multiple obstacles. Most models and frameworks built in the extant literature are not been able to capture these disruptions and as such, firms are not having proper strategies to deal with. For firms with complex supply chains (i.e., manufacturing, retailing), it is indeed critical to identify strategies to deal with such a crisis. In this paper, we intend to offer strategic insights in terms of major issues firms are facing and strategic options firms are contemplating. We rely on the twitter data from NASDAQ 100 firms to generate themes regarding the issues faced by the firms and the strategies they are adopting using text analytics tools. We find that firms are facing challenges in terms of demand-supply mismatch, technology, and development of a resilient supply chain. Moreover, moving beyond profitability, firms are experiencing difficulties to construct a sustainable supply chain. We provide futuristic strategic recommendations for the rebuilding of the supply chain.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Interplay between constraints and rewards in innovation tournaments: implications for participation

Swanand J. Deodhar

International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems

In this study, we examine how the monetary rewards and competitive constraints that organizers of innovation tournaments incorporate are associated with participation. These two aspects of innovation tournaments are crucial because they represent critical design decisions that the organizers must make beforehand. We show that the reward amount is negatively associated with participation, while the presence of competitive constraints, which “make the competitive landscape less asymmetric”, is positively associated with participation. Furthermore, the study shows that competitive constraints moderate the negative association between reward amount and participation. These findings provide insights into contestant motivation as well as the interdependencies between tournament design choices.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Using complier average causal effect estimation to examine student outcomes of the pax good behavior game when integrated with the PATHS curriculum

Catherine P. Bradshaw, Kathan Shukla, Elise T. Pas, Juliette K. Berg, and Nicholas S. Lalongo

Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research

A growing body of research has documented a link between variation in implementation dosage and outcomes associated with preventive interventions. Complier Average Causal Effect (CACE; Jo in J Educ Behav Stat 27:385-409, 2002) analysis allows for estimating program impacts in light of variation in implementation. This study reports intent-to-treat (ITT) and CACE findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing the impacts of the universal PAX Good Behavior Game (PAX GBG) integrated with Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (i.e., PATHS to PAX) and PAX GBG only compared to a control. This study used ratings by 318 K-5 teachers of 1526 at-risk children who, at baseline, were rated as displaying the top 33rd percentile of aggressive-disruptive behavior. Leveraging a prior study on these data (Berg et al. in Admin Policy Ment Health Ment Health Serv Res 44:558-571, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-016-0738-1 , 2017), CACE was defined as the effect of intervention assignment for compliers, using two compliance cut points (50th and 75th percentile), on posttest ratings of student academic engagement, social competence, peer relations, emotion regulation, hyperactivity, and aggressive-disruptive behavior. The ITT analyses indicated improvements for students in the integrated condition on ratings of social competence compared to the control condition. The CACE analyses also indicated significant effects of the integrated intervention on social competence, as well as academic engagement and emotion regulation for students in high compliance classrooms. These findings illustrate the importance of considering variation in implementation within the context of RCTs.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Modeling and design of container terminal operations

Debjit Roy, Rene De Koster, and Rene Bekker

Operations Research

The design of container terminal operations is complex because multiple factors affect operational performance. These factors include numerous choices for handling technology, terminal topology, and design parameters and stochastic interactions between the quayside, stackside, and vehicle transport processes. In this research, we propose new integrated queuing network models for rapid design evaluation of container terminals with automated lift vehicles and automated guided vehicles. These models offer the flexibility to analyze alternate design variations and develop insights. For instance, the effect of different vehicle dwell point policies is analyzed using state-dependent queues, whereas the efficient terminal layout is determined using variation in the service time expressions at the stations. We show the relation among the dwell point–dependent waiting times and also show their asymptotic equivalence at heavy traffic conditions. These models form the building blocks for design and analysis of large-scale terminal operations. We test the model efficacy using detailed in-house simulation experiments and real-terminal validation by partnering with an external party.

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Journal Articles | 2020

Capacitated multi-period maximal covering location problem with server uncertainty

Amit Kumar Vatsa and Sachin Jayaswal

European Journal of Operational Research

We study the problem of assigning doctors to existing, non-operational Primary Health Centers (PHCs). We do this in the presence of clear guidelines on the maximum population that can be served by any PHC, and uncertainties in the availability of the doctors over the planning horizon. We model the problem as a robust capacitated multi-period maximal covering location problem with server uncertainty. Such supply-side uncertainties have not been accounted for in the context of multi-period facility location in the extant literature. We present an MIP formulation of this problem, which turns out to be too difficult for an off-the-shelf solver like CPLEX. We, therefore, present several dominance rules to reduce the size of the model. We further propose a Benders decomposition based solution method with several refinements that exploit the underlying structure of the problem to solve it extremely efficiently. Our computational experiments show one of the variants of our Benders decomposition based method to be on average almost 1000 times faster, compared to the CPLEX MIP solver, for problem instances containing 300 demand nodes and 10 facilities. Further, while the CPLEX MIP solver could not solve most of the instances beyond 300 demand nodes and 10 facilities even after 20 hours, two of our variants of Benders decomposition could solve instances upto the size of 500 demand nodes and 15 facilities in less than 0.5 hour, on average.

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