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743 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2018

Decision aiding model with entropy-based subjective utility. Information Sciences

Manish Aggarwal

Information Sciences

An entropy-based method is presented to model a decision-maker’s (DM’s) subjective utility for a criterion value. The proposed method considers distribution of all the values that the criterion takes for the given set of alternatives. Based on the utility so modeled, and and the DM’s attitudinal character, a multi criteria decision aiding (MCDA) approach is developed to find the best alternative. The proposed method and the approach are applied in a real car selection case-study.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Constitution, Supreme Court and Regulation of Coal Sector in India

M P Ram Mohan and Shashikant Yadav

NUJS Law Review

The paper maps four decades of coal sector litigation before the Supreme Court of India and draws a narrative on the constitutional contestation and the legal position as it stands today. Coal is one of the most important minerals from an economic perspective, accounting for over sixty percent of India’s energy requirement. The Constitution of India empowers both the Centre and states with legislative powers relating to regulation and control over mines and minerals, including coal. The coal sector has witnessed highly contested and protracted litigation with respect to law-making powers between the Centre and state governments, and this has impacted business and society in many ways. Through a mapping of judicial decisions of Supreme Court, the contested nature of governance of Indian coal sector is detailed in the paper. The Court has consistently maintained a greater responsibility of regulating mines and mineral development on the Union government. However, advocating sustainable use of coal resources, the Court emphasised that the regulatory power vested with Centre and states must have its basis on public interest and coal must be treated as a material resource of the community.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Which interpretational route will the Supreme Court of India follow when faced with the contentious civil liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010

M P Ram Mohan

Statute Law Review

The Civil Nuclear Liability for Damages Act of India enacted in 2010 has been a matter of concern to international suppliers and vendors. This is due to the perceived deviation of the law from the principle of legal channelling of liability (to the operator) which is at the heart of international nuclear liability jurisprudence. Specifically, this notion arises from allowing recourse to suppliers under outside of the circumstances mentioned in the Annex of the Convention for Complementary Compensation. Sections 17 and 46 which embody this notion are subject to different interpretations, some of them implying the compliance of the Indian regime with the international nuclear liability regime and many others equally suggest otherwise. In 2015, Government of India through a detailed Frequently Answered Questions clarified the nature and meaning of these sections. However, interestingly, there are two cases pending before Supreme Court of India contesting the constitutionality of the legislation in which these two specific provisions are also disputed. The article attempts to explain and resolve the ambiguity through a study of Supreme Court’s approach to statutory interpretation. I undertake an analysis of the reasoning given under the 2015 FAQ in the light of the disputed Sections 17 and 46 and bring out a probable prediction of Court’s interpretation of the Sections of the Act.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Conceptualization to amendment: Kakinada as a smart city

Lavanya Chintagunta, Priyanshu Raj, and Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Journal of Public Affairs

Urbanization is globally rampant; in developing countries such as India, it is driven in a phenomenal pace by an aspiring, young society and ambitious state policies to achieve a competitive space in global economy. “Smart cities” is a new-age term coined specifically to control, monitor, measure, and evaluate our urban growth, in a way to understand how conducive are our cities for running businesses. Global borders are diminishing, and world-wide economies compete on multiple dimensions in a level playing field to participate and prosper in global markets. Cities are centers of economic activities, and the economic growth of a country largely depends on safe and supportive cities. Therefore, the need for smart cities is not difficult to establish. The more difficult questions are, “do we really know what a smart city is?” or “what are the elements that go into making an existing city smart?” Such questions are pertinent and timely. This paper attempts to answer these questions in a descriptive manner based on theoretical and empirical observations. We adopt an integrative approach of design conceptualization, policy building, and framework development, substantiated using an Indian city, namely, Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh State as an illustrative case.

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Journal Articles | 2018

A two-part dynamic pricing policy for household electricity consumption scheduling with minimized expenditure

Krishnendranath Mitra and Goutam Dutta

International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems

In this paper we propose an optimization model for scheduling electrical appliances for an individual household. Here, customers are offered dynamic prices which are a function of that household’s planned consumption and forecasted grid load. We consider a grid connected system with a battery and an in-house renewable energy generator in the proposed scheduling model. This model minimizes the customer’s electricity bill subject to different constraints. We analyze our model with various pricing policies, price ranges and appliance operation windows. We find that the expenditure of the consumer decreases considerably in our model when shifting from flat prices to dynamic prices based on the forecasted grid load and the consumer’s individual planned consumption. Considerable expenditure reduction and individual load flattening is achieved with the use of a battery and an in-house renewable energy generator. Also, larger the price range, higher is the load flattening and lower is the expenditure. We show that our proposed pricing policy is beneficial to both consumers and suppliers.

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Journal Articles | 2018

A statistical model for helices with applications

Kanti V. Mardia, Karthik Sriram, and Charlotte M. Deane

Biometrics

Motivated by a cutting edge problem related to the shape of α-helices in proteins, we formulate a parametric statistical model, which incorporates the cylindrical nature of the helix. Our focus is to detect a “kink,” which is a drastic change in the axial direction of the helix. We propose a statistical model for the straight α-helix and derive the maximum likelihood estimation procedure. The cylinder is an accepted geometric model for α-helices, but our statistical formulation, for the first time, quantifies the uncertainty in atom positions around the cylinder. We propose a change point technique “Kink-Detector” to detect a kink location along the helix. Unlike classical change point problems, the change in direction of a helix depends on a simultaneous shift of multiple data points rather than a single data point, and is less straightforward. Our biological building block is crowdsourced data on straight and kinked helices; which has set a gold standard. We use this data to identify salient features to construct Kink-detector, test its performance and gain some insights. We find the performance of Kink-detector comparable to its computational competitor called “Kink-Finder.” We highlight that identification of kinks by visual assessment can have limitations and Kink-detector may help in such cases. Further, an analysis of crowdsourced curved α-helices finds that Kink-detector is also effective in detecting moderate changes in axial directions.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Are you a cistern or a channel? Exploring factors triggering knowledge-hiding behaviour at the workplace: Evidence from the Indian R&D professionals

Jatinder Kumar Jha and Biju Varkkey

Journal of Knowledge Management

Purpose

Knowledge is considered as a strategic asset for the organizations, especially for knowledgeintensive firms. Research and development (R&D) is a significant unit in organizations, as it is devoted to knowledge creation and transfer. The success of any R&D project in an organization depends on its innovative value and the transfer of knowledge to the employees. This study aims to focus on factors triggering knowledge-hiding behavior among R&D employees, thus disrupting the knowledge creation in the organization.

Design/methodology/approach

The grounded theory approach has been used to analyze qualitative data collected from 19 in-depth interviews of R&D professionals (middle and junior level) working in Indian pharmaceutical firms.

Findings

The study identified factors that triggered knowledge-hiding behavior among employees. These factors include distrust, competitive work environment, perceived career insecurity, lack of recognition, lack of reciprocation and lack of confidence in own knowledge. In addition, four hiding strategies used by employees to hide their knowledge from their fellow members were explored and identified: playing innocent, being misleader/evasive hiding, rationalized hiding and counterquestioning.

Research limitations/implications 

Besides improving the understanding of knowledge-hiding behavior, particularly in the Indian context, this study has implications for both managerial practices and organizational policies.

Originality/value 

This paper highlights the factors influencing knowledge-hiding behavior among R&D employees. Knowledge-hiding construct has not been adequately studied; however, it prevails in the organization and has potential to influence various individual- and organizational-level outcomes. In addition, ways of hiding knowledge used by employees were identified and new forms of strategies named “counter-questioning” were found.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Determinants of conflict in channel relationships: A meta-analytic review

Dheeraj Sharma and Biswajita Parida

Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing

Purpose 

The advent of the internet, digitization and e-commerce has changed the definition of business territory, re-invented direct selling, eradicated middle men and brought the customers and sellers closer. These changes in the business scenario must have had an impact on the intensity and nature of channel conflict which needs to be inspected to structure better channel relationship strategies in the changing context. This paper aims to attempt a systematic investigation into the determinants of channel conflict in today’s context and proposes a composite model by reconciling the research so far in the domain of channel relationships.

Design/methodology/approach

An exhaustive search was carried for extant research finding in the channels resulting in the identification of 284 research papers beyond the meta-analysis by Geyskens et al. (1999). The next step was to manually scan through each of these papers to identify the studies which involved quantitative analysis including measures of association such as correlations related to conflict and the determinants of conflict. This led to the finalization of 36 research papers for the meta-analysis.

Findings 

This study proffers a model that illustrates ranking of major determinants of channel conflict. The results of the study suggest that determinants can be categorized into three major domains: organizational, interpersonal (communication, cooperation, relationship activities and opportunistic behaviour) and environmental factors (environmental volatility, competitive intensity and product or market volatility).

Research limitations/implications 

The analysis is based on static data in the sense that the correlations do not reflect supplier-channel member interactions in specific conflict situations. It may be argued that conflicts ultimately occur among firms/businesses run by individuals and individual traits may also impact the formation and resolution of conflict. Further, the quality of the measures capturing the constructs was not investigated in many studies. Final limitation pertains to the measurement of conflict. Conflict may not have been measured in a uniform manner in each of the studies analysed. As this study has evaluated extant research through a meta-analysis, it was not possible to identify the correlations between the determinant variables and the three factors (or constructs).

Practical implications

This study reconciles different research streams in this domain with the visualization of the composite model. It presents a quantitative analysis of the correlations of the determinants of conflict with channel conflict holistically. It creates a base through the composite model to carry forward the academic discussion in this domain holistically. It aims to be a ready reference for understanding the antecedents of conflict along with their significant correlations to enable prioritization of their channel strategies.

Social implications 

This meta-analysis and the suggested model that may be of use to practitioners in terms of prioritizing their activities to reduce channel conflicts through pre-emption. It is hoped that this study enhances the extant understanding of the determinants of channel conflict considerably based on the presented composite model. The results may assist to resolve channel conflicts, create channel synergies, identify optimal channel mix, reduce channel costs, increase channel efficiency and build partnerships in the changing business scenario.

Originality/value 

A holistic view of the determinants of conflict would be of enormous use to practitioners and academics alike. Hence, a detailed study is required to enlist and categorize the determinants causing conflict in channels so that an attempt can be made to resolve channel conflict for better performance of the firms. This meta-analysis study is an attempt to fill this major gap in research in this domain to quantitatively analyse the major determinants of channel conflict on the basis of analysis of research work over the past 15 years

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Journal Articles | 2018

Impact of security expenditures in military alliances on violence From non-state actors: Evidence from India

Dhruv Gupta and Karthik Sriram

World Development

In this paper, we investigate the impact of security expenditures from military alliances involving third-party intervention on violent incidents from non-state actors. Our main learning is a rather surprising fact that at a lower level of security expenditure in the violence affected area, an increase in security expenditures leads to an increase in violent incidents (rather than a decrease); and only at higher level of security expenditure in the area, an increase in security expenditure leads to a decline in violent incidents. For the analysis, we use a novel dataset on naxalite violence obtained directly from the police head-quarters of the three most affected states in India. The data consists of 64 districts spanning over years 2001 till 2013 and includes information on the annual number of violent incidents and the size of the security forces allocated specifically to curb the naxalite violence. We use negative binomial regression model with the number of violent incidents as the dependent variable and lagged size of security forces as the independent variable, while controlling for other relevant variables. Further, to address issues of potential reverse causality, we use a propensity score matching technique to infer the causal nature of such an association.

We also argue that when the union government intervenes as a third party to support the state governments to fight the naxalites, the latter may be under-funding by free riding. However, despite such underfunding, if the overall contribution is positive and continued, eventually the concentration of security forces in an area will overwhelm the naxalites and reduce the incidents.

Lastly, we highlight that though the mainstream literature on civil wars has used per capita income as a proxy for security expenditures, it becomes inappropriate when a more direct measure of security expenditures is used.

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Journal Articles | 2018

Navigating embeddedness: Experiences of Indian IT suppliers and employees in the Netherlands

Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday, Ernesto Noronha, and Premilla D'Cruz

Journal of Business Ethics

In this article, we shift the usual analytical attention of the GPN framework from lead firms to suppliers in the network and from production to IT services. Our focus is on how Indian IT suppliers embed in the Netherlands along the threefold characterization of societal, territorial and network embeddedness. We argue that Indian IT suppliers attempt to display societal embeddedness when they move to The Netherlands. Our findings reveal that the endeavour by Indian IT suppliers to territorially dis-embed from the Dutch context is reinforced by their peripheral position in the network and their ability to offshore work in a bid to contain costs, in addition to the influence of client domination. Therefore, territorial embeddedness is considered to be secondary to societal embeddedness which is intertwined with client interest while neglecting the interest of other network members. Nonetheless, the inter-firm relationship is complex, given the tension between societal, territorial and network embeddedness. While preferring Indian IT suppliers because of their low pricing, Dutch clients also insist on compliance with the institutional context of the Netherlands especially when it comes to Dutch employees. This results in hybridization which means that Indian IT suppliers find ways to adhere to the institutional framework for Dutch nationals while simultaneously insulating Indian employees from the same. Consequently, a highly unfair segmented internal labour market develops, with Dutch nationals being treated more favourably as compared to Indian nationals. Nonetheless, to address these violations, Indian employees prefer individual strategies of resilience and rework rather than a collectivization response.

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IIMA