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2757 items in total found

Working Papers | 2012

International Competitive Strategy Choices: Comparing Firms in China and India

Ping Lv, Monica Plechero, Rakesh Basant, and Xie-Lin Liu

The international business literature has yet to adequately explore international competitive strategy choices made by firms in developing countries. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the types of international competitive strategies followed by Chinese and Indian firms. Using firm-level primary data, the study analyzes factors that affect strategy choices and whether these factors differ between the two countries. The empirical results indicate that besides cost leadership strategies, firms have already developed international differentiation strategies and strategies combining cost and differentiation advantages (hybrid strategies). This confirms that firms from China and India are moving to international markets not only because of their low cost advantage but also because they are upgrading their capabilities to compete in the global market. The study highlights the fact that firms' resources and capabilities influence firms' propensity to choose a specific international competitive strategy and that the strategies can also differ in relation to the destination market. In general, the pursuit of well-articulated international competitive strategies (in particular differentiation strategy) is more common among Indian firms than among Chinese firms.

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Working Papers | 2012

A Lin-Kernighan Heuristic for Single Row Facility Layout

Ravi Kothari and Diptesh Ghosh

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The problem is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a neighborhood search heuristic called LK-INSERT which uses a Lin-Kernighan neighborhood structure built on insertion neighborhoods. To the best of our knowledge this is the first such heuristic for the SRFLP. Our computational experiments show that LK-INSERT is competitive and improves the best known solutions for several large sized benchmark SRFLP instances.

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Working Papers | 2012

Tabu Search for the Single Row Facility Layout Problem Using Exhaustive 2-Opt and Insertion Neighborhoods

Ravi Kothari and Diptesh Ghosh

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is the problem of arranging facilities with given lengths on a line, while minimizing the weighted sum of the distances between all pairs of facilities. The problem is NP-hard. In this paper, we present two tabu search implementations, one involving an exhaustive search of the 2-opt neighborhood and the other involving an exhaustive search of the insertion neighborhood. We also present techniques to significantly speed up the search of the two neighborhoods. Our computational experiments show that the speed up techniques are effective, and our tabu search implementations are competitive. Our tabu search implementations improved several previously known best solutions for large sized benchmark SRFLP instances.

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Working Papers | 2012

On the Blowout Preventer Testing Problem: An Approach to Checking for Leakage in BOP Networks

Diptesh Ghosh

Blowout Preventers (BOPs) and choke manifolds are key pieces of drilling rig equipment to prevent the uncontrolled release of potentially hazardous formation fluids to surface. The blowout prevention testing problem is that of testing BOP valves to check if they are functional or not. Several type of testing is done on these valves. This paper deals with the check if the valves are capable of holding pressure. We present a decision model that allows a structured and time saving approach to minimize the number of test sets in order to identify leakage. Recently the BOP terminology has gained prominence and public attention as a result of the Macondo blow-out and resulting oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of the USA.

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Working Papers | 2012

Parental Education as a Criterion for Affirmative Action in Higher Education: A Preliminary Analysis

Rakesh Basant and Gitanjali Sen

Affirmative action, especially in the form of reservation policies, to address the issues of inclusion and equity has been in place in India for a long time. Through these policies higher participation of the marginalized groups is sought in the political, educational and work related domains. Over the years the scope and coverage of these reservation policies has been enlarged through the inclusion of new social groups and by incorporating new 'spaces' hitherto not available to certain social groups. The available evidence suggests that that the policies of reservation have not been an unqualified success. Besides, policies that were perceived as temporary have not only persisted but grown. Apart from uneven participation of marginalized groups in the three domains, recent studies have highlighted three developments that suggest a rethink on affirmative action (read reservation) policies in India: (1) The social hierarchy and conditions which formed the basis of affirmative action are undergoing a change in India; (2) Several issues have come up in the implementation of the reservation policies; and (3) Recent empirical studies have identified more robust measures of participation in higher education by different social groups and have provided some new insights on the determinants of differentials in such participation. Given this broad context, the paper explores if criteria other than caste and community can be used to form the basis for affirmative action. More specifically, we explore if parental education is an appropriate criterion for this purpose.

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Working Papers | 2011

An Adaptive Probabilistic Model for Broadcasting
in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Kavitha Ranganathan

Ad hoc peer-to-peer mobile phone networks (phone MANETs) enable cheap village level telephony for cash-strapped, off-the-grid communities. Broadcasting is a fundamental operation in such manets and is used for route discovery. This paper proposed a new broadcast technique that is lightweight, efficient and incurs low latency. Using extensive simulations, we compare our proposed technique to existing lightweight protocols. The results show that our technique is successful in outperforming existing lightweight techniques on the criteria that are critical for a phone-MANET.

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Working Papers | 2011

A Conceptual Overview of Structural Equation Modeling

Tathagata Banerjee, Arindam Banerjee, and Erina Paul

A synthesized version of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and its possible applications in Management problems is presented. The main contribution of the paper is its simple description of a somewhat complex statistical process for the understanding of the beginners in this domain. It acts as a initial reading in SEM, before the researchers delve into more complex exposition of the statistical technique. The description is largely in English (not statistics) and is palatable to readers not trained enough in the domain of statistics.

It will serve as a good overview of this methodology for FPM students in business schools.

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Working Papers | 2011

Efficient Broadcasting for a Mobile Ad-hoc Network
based Peer-to-peer Community Radio Service

Kavitha Ranganathan

Ad-hoc networks consisting entirely of simple mobile phones can be used to deploy village level telephony. We investigate a novel application for such networks-a peer-to peer community radio service. We envision a system, where any user in the network is equally empowered to generate and distribute audio content to the entire network, using his or her mobile phone. This study concentrates on a critical aspect of this service-the choice of the network-wide broadcast protocol. Using extensive simulations, we evaluate the suitability of various broadcast techniques for a rural peer-to-peer mobile adhoc network. Our simulations identify the best choice of protocols under various village network conditions while simultaneously identifying limitations of the current protocols.

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Working Papers | 2011

The Single Row Facility Layout Problem: State of the Art

Ravi Kothari and Diptesh Ghosh

The single row facility layout problem (SRFLP) is a NP-hard problem concerned with the arrangement of facilities of given lenghs on a line so as to minimize the weighted sum of the distances between all the pairs of facilities. The SRFLP and its special cases often arise while modeling a large variety of applications. It was actively researched until the mid-nineties. It has again been actively studied since 2005. Interestingly, research on many aspects of this problem is still in the initial stages, and hence the SRFLP is an interesting problem to work on. In this paper, we review the literature on the SRFLP and comment on its relationship with other location problems. We then provide an overview of different formulations of the problem that appear in the literature. We provide exact and heuristic approaches that have been used to solve SRFLPs, and finally point out research gaps and promising directions for future research on this problem.

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Working Papers | 2011

Impact of Inter-organizational Relationships on Organizational Learning

Vijayta Doshi and Pradyumana Khokle

Literature on organizational learning has mainly focused on intra-organizational learning with little emphasis on inter-organizational learning. Organizations engage in strategic collaborations with other organizations. To realise the full potential of such relationships, it is very important for organizations to realise how learning may take place in such formal inter-organizational set-ups and understand various modes through which learning can be enhanced. This would foster their long term relationships. The paper explores how inter-organizational relationships foster organizational learning process through experiential and vicarious learning. The paper further explores various factors that impact the extent of learning in inter-organizational relationships.

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