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3552 items in total found

Working Papers | 2001

The Business Logic for Dotcom Businesses

Ramachandran K

The rise and fall of a number of dotcoms has attracted a lot of attention in business press, but there does not seem to have been any in depth study to understand the economic logic of dotcom businesses. A close analysis of these businesses would show that many of them actually do not have any sound business model. Many of their assumptions are questionable. This paper attempts to provide an explanation to it using original concepts such as latent want, zero customer dissatisfaction and customer dissatisfaction elimination chain. It is argues that many firms fumbled because they did not try to see whether there existed any customer dissatisfaction and subsequent need for a dot com firm to eliminate the dissatisfaction. It is also found that firms did not see their capabilities to provide overall positive value when they focused on eliminating dissatisfaction at one point.

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Working Papers | 2001

Influencing Human Resource Management Practices of Subsidiaries by Parent Companies Empirical Evidences from India

Sunil Kumar Maheshwari

Effective management of transfrontier operations of Multinational Companies (MNCs) requires integration of subsidiaries for global competitiveness and autonomy of subsidiaries for local responsiveness. With the increased turbulence in the environment it is increasingly important to these subsidiaries to act fast to retain and build local competitive advantage in different countries of operations. These twin demands to manage global organizations are primarily centered on the following question that the managers at the parent company need to respond. “How to ensure subsidiaries managers to act in autonomous manner to respond effectively to local needs- yet, be able to influence the actions of these managers whenever the need arises?” This can be effectively achieved through staffing and other HRM practices in such diversified companies. The study examined the HR practices of the subsidiaries in this context. The study indicates that HR systems continue to remain autonomous with subsidiaries, though, there are differences across different HR activities. Subsidiarys turnover and age are the two variables that influence the subsidiary autonomy on different HR issues most. Increased turnover of the subsidiary is positively related to parents influence on HR related matters at subsidiary. India remains to be the host nation with less expatriation of managers from parent companies. Parent companies employ multiple influencing mechanisms in subsidiaries to achieve the task of global integration. The intensity of influence increases with increase of equity stakes of companies. Increased expatriation and cultural proximity are frequently used by MNCs to influence their subsidiaries in India.

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Working Papers | 2000

Investment Pattern And Decision Making: The Role of Working Women

Pestonjee D M and Balsara Anita H

An attempt is made to study how far working women enjoy freedom to take investment related decisions on their own and the pattern of investments in the male dominated investment world in India. The questions related to investment pattern and its decision maker with respect to working women was studied by taking, 227 respondents from 3 cities: 108 in Ahmedabad, 60 in Solapur, 59 in Gulbarga. Questionnaire method was administered and data were collected on saving, types of investment, influencers, expenditure and decision-makers. In order to answer the questions, conventional and non-conventional statistics were used. There is no significant difference among the respondents across the cities with respect to age, family size, type of family, marital status, level of education, occupation and annual income. No cultural and demographical patterns are associated with decision making of working women.

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Working Papers | 2000

The Weighted Fair Division Problem

Lahiri Somdeb

The exact problem we are concerned with in this paper is of the following nature. There are a finite number of producers each equipped with a utility function of the standard variety, which converts and input into a producer specific output. An allocation of the input among the producers is sought which is Pareto efficient i.e. there is no reallocation which increases the output of one producer without decreasing the output of any other. This, as is very widely known, corresponds to maximizing the weighted sum of the utility functions subject to a resource constraint. Alternatively, the weights can be interpreted as exogenously specified prices of the separate outputs and then the problem reduces to maximizing the aggregate revenue subject to a resource constraint. Out analysis focuses on the relations between the optimal solutions and the price and aggregate resource pair. Further, we also study the effect on the former of varying the latter pair.

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Working Papers | 2000

Police Performance, Image and A Desired Future

Singh J P

Designed as a follow-up of an earlier study, the present investigation aims at identifying Strengths, Weakness and a Desirable Future as perceived by the Senior Police Officers. The study revalidates the previous self-assessment of police performance and shows that while Police excels in providing VIP security, it is somewhat ineffective in enforcing the rule of law. It also highlights the acknowledged low public image of police and prevalence of several undesirable behaviour patterns in the force that have crept in over time. The perceived strengths of the police force include Discipline, Capacity to Withstand Hardships and Quick Response to Crisis. Coupled with the desire to see Future as a peaceful, democratic society that is free from discrimination, these strengths provide a base on which organizational changes can be built. The study recommends a program of internal workshops to introspect and examine findings in an atmosphere of openness and trust with the objective of identifying steps for change in the organization and build societal support for the same.

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Working Papers | 2000

Vector Optimization With Multiple Constraints

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we show that a vector optimization problem with convex constraint functions which satisfy a constraint qualification can be reduced to a vector optimization problem with a single constraint, if the objective function satisfy a certain generalization of quasi-concavity.

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Working Papers | 2000

The Top Cycle And Uncovered Solutions for Abstract Games: Axiomatic Characterizations

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we consider binary relations which are reflexive and complete. Such binary relations are referred to in the literature as abstract games. Given an abstract game a (game)solution is a function which associates to each subset a non-empty collection of points of the subset. In this paper we provide axiomatic characterizations of the top cycle and uncovered solutions for abstract games. In a final section of the paper, the similarity between a game solution and a choice function of classical rational choice theory is exploited to axiomatically characterize the top cycle and uncovered choice functions.

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Working Papers | 2000

A Study of Learned Helplessness & Perceived Role Efficacy Among Executives in Pharmaceutical Industry

Pestonjee D M, Oza Shweta, and Sayeed-uz-Zafar

Learned Helplessness is a cognitive state of being which believes that whatever it does is not going to alter the outcome of an event. In the other words, it comes to believe in response-outcome-non-contingency. Role efficacy can be seen as the psychological factor underlying role effectiveness, in short role efficacy is the potential effectiveness of a role. A total of 40 executives of pharmaceutical industry were used as sample. After using appropriate statistical tools it was found that moderate level of learned helplessness were prevailing among them and dominant LH factors include LH1, LH4 and LH6. While on role efficacy moderate effectiveness were observed Centrality, Proactivity, Superordination and Influence needs special attention to improve the effectiveness of the executives. Some significant correlation were also observed among various factors of Learned Helplessness and Perceived Role Efficacy.

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Working Papers | 2000

Coastal Shipping: Scope of Integrating with the National Transport Network

G. Raghuram

Coastal shipping constitutes about 30% of the total traffic handled at our ports. Exhibit 1 gives data for the past two years for the major ports, the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) ports, and the non-GMB minor and intermediate ports. We see that the total coastal traffic for 1998-99 was 87.4 million tonnes (mt.). Out of this, 75.8 mt (86.7%) was handled in the major ports, 6.4 mt (7.3%) was handled in the GMB ports and the rest 5.2 mt (5.9%) in the non-GMB minor and intermediate ports.

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Working Papers | 2000

Axiomatic Characterisation of Weighted Voting Operator

Lahiri Somdeb

A federation voting operator allows a finite set of coalitions to unilaterally elect any outcome. There are several special types of federation voting operators, all of which share a property: the candidates are assigned weights, and for a coalition to be decisive, it is necessary that the sum of the weights of its members exceed a pre-assigned quota. In this paper we address the following question: When is a Federation Voting Operator a Weighted Voting Operator?

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