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821 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2020

PhD student experiences with the impostor phenomenon in STEM

Devasmita Chakraverty

International Journal of Doctoral Studies

Aim/Purpose

This US-based study explored various facets of impostor phenomenon experienced during PhD training in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Specifically, the purpose of this research was to identify certain experiences that trigger this phenomenon.

Background

Competent high-achievers who do not believe in their efforts leading to accomplishments sometimes experience the impostor phenomenon. It is characterized by the notion that one has fooled others into overestimating their ability, not attributing one’s accomplishments to ability, and living with the fear of being discovered as a fraud.

Methodology

Data were collected using convenience and snowball sampling. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews from 90 PhD students were analyzed thematically.

Contribution

Study findings contribute to a less-understood area of what constitutes triggers for the impostor phenomenon among PhD students in STEM fields.

Findings

Participants described the following themes that triggered impostor phenomenon during PhD training: 1) Progress and public recognition, 2) Comparing oneself with others, 3) Developing skills: public speaking and scientific writing. 4) Application of new knowledge, and 5) Asking for help.

Recommendations for Practitioners

PhD faculty, mentors, advisers, and administrators should be cognizant of the triggers that could give rise to the impostor phenomenon among their students. Professional development activities for students could focus on earlier and more rigorous training for improving scientific communication.

Recommendation for Researchers

Future research should continue to explore if other stakeholders in academia such as postdoctoral trainees and faculty also experience similar stress due to the impostor phenomenon.

Impact on Society

Institutes of higher education should continue to focus on improving student mental health and retention rates, alleviating some of the PhD training stressors by designing interventions that improve students’ mindset and self-efficacy.

Future Research

Findings point to avenues for further research on how to support those with impostor phenomenon. Future research could explore the topic in other disciplines outside STEM and examine if long-term interventions could mitigate impostor-feelings, including the nature and length of interventions that could be helpful.

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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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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

The rise of the technological manager in India in the 1960s: the role of the Indian institutes of management

Chinmay Tumbe

Management & Organizational History

A distinctive aspect of India’s managerial elite is that it is dominated by people with an educational background in engineering. This paper unravels the history of how this major phenomenon arose, by tracking the evolution of management education in mid-twentieth century India. It emphasizes the significance of the network developed between the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and points to important contextual factors including the industrial recession of 1968–70 and admission test criteria that contributed heavily to the rise of the ‘technological manager’. Some of these factors continued to be important in the early twenty-first century, having implications on the diversity of educational backgrounds and diversity by gender among India’s managerial elite.

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Journal Articles | 2020

stochastic loss reserving: A new perspective from a Dirichlet model

Karthik Sriram and Peng Shi

Journal of Risk and Insurance

Forecasting the outstanding claim liabilities to set adequate reserves is critical for a nonlife insurer's solvency. Chain–Ladder and Bornhuetter–Ferguson are two prominent actuarial approaches used for this task. The selection between the two approaches is often ad hoc due to different underlying assumptions. We introduce a Dirichlet model that provides a common statistical framework for the two approaches, with some appealing properties. Depending on the type of information available, the model inference naturally leads to either Chain–Ladder or Bornhuetter–Ferguson prediction. Using claims data on Worker's compensation insurance from several U.S. insurers, we discuss both frequentist and Bayesian inference.

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IIMA