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3549 items in total found

Working Papers | 2018

Does Entrepreneurial Logic Impact Funding Evaluation of Startups?

Rajesh Jain, Valerie Mendonca, Neharika Vohra, and Supriya Sharma

From a neoclassical economics perspective, entrepreneurship involves rational decision-making and entrepreneurs engage in rational, goal-driven behavior. However, such a view is put to test in current, dynamic business environments characterized by high level of uncertainty. Expert entrepreneurs adopt a nimble, iterative and effectual approach to be able to navigate such dynamic environments. While there is growing confidence about the desirable outcomes of an effectual logic, there is limited evidence based understanding of how such a logic is perceived by stakeholders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. For instance, how do investors assess causal vs. effectual logics of entrepreneurs? This study attempts to pursue this question. We use data from a national level entrepreneurship competition held in India in 2015 to understand the influence of entrepreneurs' logics on their funding outcomes. We find that the logics of the selected and not selected entries are significantly distinct. Furthermore, results from a binary logistic regression reveal an inclination of investors towards causal logic. Adoption of causal logic increases a startup's chances of funding by about 50%. Findings are discussed in reference to implications for the current entrepreneurship ecosystem.

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Working Papers | 2018

Leadership and Management of Public Sector Undertakings in an Emerging Economy

Vishal Gupta, Swanand Kulkarni, and Naresh Khatri

Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) contribute significantly to the growth and economic development of any country. This study explores the key managerial challenges faced by the leaders and managers of public sector organizations. We interviewed 42 senior managers of PSUs from various industries representing 12 Indian states representing all the regions of India. Specifically, three key managerial challenges emerged in our study: political interference and lack of autonomy, rigid rules and HR practices, and lack of employee motivation. Positive leader personality, communication skills, change- and relation-oriented behaviors, HR skills, and decision-making emerged as top leader qualities. Staffing, training and development and performance management emerged as the top priorities of HR departments of PSUs. Public-service motivation, job security and work environment were the top reasons for continuing to work in PSUs for Indian leaders. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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Working Papers | 2018

Is the Past Still Holding Us Back? A Study on Intergenerational Education Mobility in India (revised as on 26.09.18)

Kishan P K V

This paper explores various aspects of, and factors affecting intergenerational education mobility in India. We employ IHDS-II (2011-12) and prepare a representative dataset that goes beyond 'co-resident only' son-father pairs by utilizing the retrospective information conveying the educational attainment of the father of the male household head. From the resulting sample of 44,532 son-father pairs and appropriate cohort analysis, we find that there is still a high degree of intergenerational persistence in education, although the same is decreasing steadily over time. Through quantile regressions, we detect a non-linearity in the relationship between fathers' and sons' schooling outcomes along the education distribution. Moreover, the mobility gap between the historically advantaged subgroups (urban population, upper castes, Hindus, etc.) and the others (rural population, lower castes, Muslim, etc.) increasingly widens along the middle and upper quantiles of the distribution. Finally, "Higher Inequality (during fathers' generation) à Lesser Mobility" nexus in education plays out for the Indian scenario and thus corroborates the 'Great Gatsby Curve'. Other macro variables, economic growth and public expenditure in education, bear a positive association with education mobility.

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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.

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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

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Journal Articles | 2017

Investigating a An evolutionary analysis of growth and fluctuations with negative externalities

Anindya S. Chakrabarti and Ratul Lakhar

Dynamic Games and Applications

We present an evolutionary game theoretic model of growth and fluctuations with negative externalities. Agents in a population choose the level of input. Total output is a function of aggregate input and a productivity parameter. The model, which is equivalent to a tragedy of the commons, constitutes an aggregative potential game with negative externalities. Aggregate input at the Nash equilibrium is inefficiently high causing aggregate payoff to be suboptimally low. Simulations with the logit dynamic reveal that while the aggregate input increases monotonically from an initial low level, aggregate payoff may decline from the corresponding high level. Hence, a positive technology shock causes a rapid initial increase in aggregate payoff, which is unsustainable as agents increase aggregate input to the inefficient equilibrium level. Aggregate payoff, therefore, declines subsequently. A sequence of exogenous shocks, therefore, generates a sustained pattern of growth and fluctuations in aggregate payoff.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Financial fluctuations anchored to economic fundamentals: A mesoscopic network approach

Kiran Sharma, Balagopal Gopalakrishnan, Anindya S. Chakrabarti, and Anirban Chakraborti

Scientific Reports

We demonstrate the existence of an empirical linkage between nominal financial networks and the underlying economic fundamentals, across countries. We construct the nominal return correlation networks from daily data to encapsulate sector-level dynamics and infer the relative importance of the sectors in the nominal network through measures of centrality and clustering algorithms. Eigenvector centrality robustly identifies the backbone of the minimum spanning tree defined on the return networks as well as the primary cluster in the multidimensional scaling map. We show that the sectors that are relatively large in size, defined with three metrics, viz., market capitalization, revenue and number of employees, constitute the core of the return networks, whereas the periphery is mostly populated by relatively smaller sectors. Therefore, sector-level nominal return dynamics are anchored to the real size effect, which ultimately shapes the optimal portfolios for risk management. Our results are reasonably robust across 27 countries of varying degrees of prosperity and across periods of market turbulence (2008–09) as well as periods of relative calmness (2012–13 and 2015–16).

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Journal Articles | 2017

Emergence of anti-coordination through reinforcement learning in generalized minority games

Anindya S. Chakrabarti and Diptesh Ghosh

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination

In this paper we propose adaptive strategies to solve coordination failures in a prototype generalized minority game model with a multi-agent, multi-choice environment. We illustrate the model with an application to large scale distributed processing systems with a large number of agents and servers. In our set up, agents are assigned responsibility to complete tasks that require unit time. They request servers to process these tasks. Servers can process only one task at a time. Agents have to choose servers independently and simultaneously, and have access to the outcomes of their own past requests only. Coordination failure occurs if more than one agent simultaneously requests the same server to process tasks at the same time, while other servers remain idle. Since agents are independent, this leads to multiple coordination failures. In this paper, we propose strategies based on reinforcement learning that minimize such coordination failures. We also prove a null result that a large category of probabilistic strategies which attempts to combine information about other agents’ strategies, asymptotically converge to uniformly random choices over the servers.

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Journal Articles | 2017

Investigating a comparative evaluation approach in explaining loyalty

Anand Kumar Jaiswal and Jos G.A.M. Lemmink

Marketing Intelligence and Planning

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the superiority of comparative evaluation or relative attitudinal measurement approach in which the respondent evaluates one object with direct comparison with other objects. The study uses comparative and non-comparative approaches to examine the effects of service quality, value, and customer satisfaction on attitudinal loyalty in a service setting.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses the data collected from the survey of 300 customers of two large Indian banks.

Findings

The results provide partial support to the superiority of the comparative evaluation over non-comparative evaluation. Additionally, results indicate that service quality positively affects customer value, and both service quality and customer value have a direct positive effect on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction drives attitudinal loyalty which in turn leads to customers’ willingness to pay more.

Research limitations/implications

In the study, two banks were used for comparative evaluation. Since consumers’ consideration set can consist of more than two alternatives, future studies can include more than two objects.

Practical implications

Non-comparative measurements do not always adequately explain customer loyalty and superior performance of firms. This could potentially lead to misinterpretations of effects of service quality improvement programs and thus sub-optimal management decisions. Managers should use comparative evaluation approach for measuring marketing variables wherever possible.

Originality/value

Although the use of comparative evaluation is suggested in the literature (Dick and Basu, 1994), extant research has not systematically examined its superiority over non-comparative evaluation. This study empirically tests the comparative evaluation approach against the non-comparative approach by examining a comprehensive model involving the interrelationships among service quality, value, customer satisfaction, and their impact on attitudinal loyalty and willingness to pay more.

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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.

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