Home Menu
icon-menu-close.svg

Research Productive

Show result

Clear
Search Query :
Area :
Search Query :
3556 items in total found

Working Papers | 2018

Indian Antecedents to Modern Economic Thought

Satish Y. Deodhar

The history of economic thought begins with salutations to Greek writings of Aristotle and Plato. While the fourth century BCE Greek writings may have been the fount of modern economic thought that emerged in Europe starting 18th century CE, there has been a general unawareness of the economic thinking that emanated from the Indian subcontinent. Pre-classical thoughts that had appeared in Vedas dating a millennium prior to the Greek writings had culminated in their comprehensive coverage in the treatise Arthashastra by Kautilya in the fourth century BCE. In this context, the paper outlines various ancient Indian texts and the economic thoughts expressed therein, delves on the reasons why they have gone unnoticed, brings to the fore the economic policies laid down by Kautilya, shows how these policies exemplify pragmatic application of the modern economic principles, and brings out in bold relief, the contribution of this Pre-Classical literature in the history of economic thought.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2018

Marketplace Options in an Emerging Economy Local Food Marketing System- Producers' Choices, Choice Determinants and Requirements

Aashish Argade and A. K. Laha

One of the important objectives of reforms in Indian agricultural marketing was to stimulate competition in the local food marketing system dominated by the state-regulated APMC marketplaces. This study was taken up to understand the different kinds of marketplaces that were available to producers besides the APMCs. Based on survey conducted in one of the pioneering states that introduced reforms, it was found that APMC and farm-gate emerged as the dominant marketplace options. The factors influencing choice of marketplaces were identified using binary logistic regression. Perishability of the produce, and services such as grading, storage and transport provided by buyers were found to be significant determinants of marketplace choice. A post-hoc survey was conducted to gauge farmers' expectations of services and facilities of a marketplace by presenting four scenarios. Even as farmers seem to expect a full-fledged APMC with wide-ranging facilities, warehousing seemed to be their major requirement. Willingness to pay for facilities and services was an important takeaway from the findings. The study has important implications for policy design and implementation, and scope for private sector participation

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

Quantifying invariant features of within-group inequality in consumption across groups.

Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Arnab Chatterjee, Tushar Nandi, Asim Ghosh, and Anirban Chakraborti

Journal of Economics interaction and Coordination

We study unit-level expenditure on consumption across multiple countries and multiple years, in order to extract invariant features of consumption distribution. We show that the bulk of it is lognormally distributed, followed by a power law tail at the limit. The distributions coincide with each other under normalization by mean expenditure and log scaling even though the data is sampled across multiple dimension including, e.g. time, social structure and locations. This phenomenon indicates that the dispersions in consumption expenditure across various social and economic groups are significantly similar subject to suitable scaling and normalization. Further, the results provide a measurement of the core distributional features. Other descriptive factors including those of sociological, demographic and political nature, add further layers of variation on the this core distribution. We present a stochastic multiplicative model to quantitatively characterize the invariance and the distributional features.

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

How to answer some tricky interview questions?

Asha Kaul

HBR Ascend

Go to link

Journal Articles | 2017

Productivity differences and inter-state migration in the U.S.: A multilateral gravity approach

Anindya S. Chakrabarti and Aparna Sengupta

Economic Modelling

In this paper, we study the quantitative role of productivity differences in explaining migration in presence of multiple destination choices. We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with multi-region, multi-sector set-up where labor is a mobile input, which adjusts to regional and sectoral productivity shocks, resulting in migration across regions. The proposed model generates a migration network where the flow of migrants between any two regions follows a gravity equation. We calibrate the model to the U.S. data and we find that variation in industrial and regional total factor productivity shocks explains about 63% of the interstate migration in the U.S. Finally, we perform comparative statics to estimate the effects of long-run structural changes on migration. We find that capital intensity of the production process and the demand for services over manufactured goods negatively impact aggregate level of migration whereas asymmetries in trade patterns do not appear to have substantial effects.

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

Accounting for political opinions, power, and influence: A Voting advice application

Tommi Pajala, Pekka Korhonen, Pekka Malo, Ankur Sinha, Jyrki Wallenius, and Akram Dehnokhalaji

European Journal of Operational Research

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online decision support systems that try to match voters with political parties or candidates in elections, typically based on how each responds to a number of policy issue statements. Such VAAs play a major role in many countries. In this paper, we describe the development and large-scale application of a new innovative matching algorithm for the most widely used VAA in Finland. We worked closely with the owner of the VAA, the largest daily newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat. Their previous algorithm, which one might call a “naive” approach, was improved by including measures of candidate’s political power and influence, using proxy variables of media visibility and incumbency status. The VAA was implemented for the 2015 Parliamentary Election in Finland; our matching algorithm was used by 140,000 voters (26.7% of the electorate) in the Helsinki election district. The innovative algorithm generated recommendations that many voters were happy about, followed by users’ incidental comments that this was the first time the VAA recommended candidates they wanted to vote for. This showed the importance of catering to different kinds of voters with a model not previously considered by any VAA in any country.

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

A review on bilevel optimization: from classical to evolutionary approaches and applications

Ankur Sinha, Pekka Malo, and Kalyanmoy Deb

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

Bilevel optimization is defined as a mathematical program, where an optimization problem contains another optimization problem as a constraint. These problems have received significant attention from the mathematical programming community. Only limited work exists on bilevel problems using evolutionary computation techniques; however, recently there has been an increasing interest due to the proliferation of practical applications and the potential of evolutionary algorithms in tackling these problems. This paper provides a comprehensive review on bilevel optimization from the basic principles to solution strategies; both classical and evolutionary. A number of potential application problems are also discussed. To offer the readers insights on the prominent developments in the field of bilevel optimization, we have performed an automated text-analysis of an extended list of papers published on bilevel optimization to date. This paper should motivate evolutionary computation researchers to pay more attention to this practical yet challenging area.

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

Optimal management of naturally regenerating uneven-aged forests

Ankur Sinha, Janne Ramo, Pekka Malo, and Olli Tahvonen

European Journal of Operational Research

A shift from even-aged forest management to uneven-aged management practices leads to a problem rather different from the existing straightforward practice that follows a rotation cycle of artificial regeneration, thinning of inferior trees and a clearcut. A lack of realistic models and methods suggesting how to manage uneven-aged stands in a way that is economically viable and ecologically sustainable creates difficulties in adopting this new management practice. To tackle this problem, we make a two-fold contribution in this paper. The first contribution is the proposal of an algorithm that is able to handle a realistic uneven-aged stand management model that is otherwise computationally tedious and intractable. The model considered in this paper is an empirically estimated size-structured ecological model for uneven-aged spruce forests. The second contribution is on the sensitivity analysis of the forest model with respect to a number of important parameters. The analysis provides us an insight into the behavior of the uneven-aged forest model.

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

Approximated set-valued mapping approach for handling multiobjective bilevel problems

Ankur Sinha, Pekka Malo, and Kalyanmoy Deb

Computers & Operations Research

A significant amount of research has been done on bilevel optimization problems both in the realm of classical and evolutionary optimization. However, the multiobjective extensions of bilevel programming have received relatively little attention from researchers in both the domains. The existing algorithms are mostly brute-force nested strategies, and therefore computationally demanding. In this paper, we develop insights into multiobjective bilevel optimization through theoretical progress made in the direction of parametric multiobjective programming. We introduce an approximated set-valued mapping procedure that would be helpful in the development of efficient evolutionary approaches for solving these problems. The utility of the procedure has been emphasized by incorporating it in a hierarchical evolutionary framework and assessing the improvements. Test problems with varying levels of complexity have been used in the experiments.

Go to link
Read More

Journal Articles | 2017

Through the looking Glass: Role of construal level on description-intensive reviews

Swagato Chatterjee and Aruna Divya T

Advances in Consumer Research

Focus on consumer engagement has led service providers to explore contextual factors influencing consumers’ satisfaction. In this paper, we draw insights from Construal Level Theory to identify the conditions when own vs. others’ experiences along with Process vs. Outcome attributes of services become more important in overall service evaluation

Go to link
Read More