Home Menu
icon-menu-close.svg

Faculty & Research

Faculty & Research

Research Productive

Show result

Clear
Search Query :
Area :
Search Query :
3722 items in total found

Working Papers | 2013

Attitudes towards Risk of Forest Dependent Communities - Evidence from Andhra Pradesh

B. Sundar and Vineet Virmani

This study is an attempt to generate empirical evidence on attitude towards risk of forest dependent communities (FDCs). The FDCs covered in the study include two different geographical regions from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh-Rayalaseema (a relatively dry forest region with low income) and the coastal region (relatively fertile forest and with higher income). Attitude towards risk was measured as the revealed degree of risk aversion (as a constant relative risk aversion coefficient) from the multiple price list methodology. With these measures, on average, members of FDCs from Rayalaseema were found to be more risk averse as compared to their counterparts from the coastal region. Using interval regression, the study also looked at the role of income and socioeconomic variables on their risk behaviors. For members of FDCs from Rayalaseema, income was not found to be a contributor towards risk aversion. Including socioeconomic variables in the regression showed that on average being men, married and a shared decision-maker within family contributed positively to risk aversion, and membership to managing committee and having adult children in the family negatively so. Degree of risk aversion for members of FDCs in the coastal region, however, did show a role for income, albeit weak statistically. In particular, members from the low and high income groups were found to be risk seeking and those from the middle income groups risk averse, with family size and education contributing positively to risk aversion and proximity to urban centers negatively so.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Market Timing Ability of Indian Firms in Open Market Repurchases

Sobhesh Kumar Agarwalla, Joshy Jacob, and Ellapulli Vasudevan

The paper examines the market timing ability of Indian firms engaged in open market repur-
chases. The study is primarily motivated by the unique disclosure feature of repurchases in
India, where the disclosures are far more frequent than in any other market. We find that
the repurchasing firms in India are able accumulate shares at favorable prices similar to the
US market. However, the cost savings do not translate into significant wealth creation for the
insiders as indicated by the short-run and long-run abnormal returns. This is contrary to the
evidence from markets like the US. Further, the cross-sectional variations in the cost savings
from repurchase execution in India are explained by the overall market returns and not by
firm characteristics. These findings contrast with that of US, where the firm characteristics
significantly explain the cross-sectional variation in the savings measure. It appears that the
more frequent disclosure of repurchase activity in India cripples the market timing ability by
reducing the information asymmetry between the firm and the outsiders. This conclusion is
further supported by the irrelevance of the past or concurrent stock returns in explaining the
time variation in the repurchase activity of firms.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Leadership and Creativity in the Indian R&D Laboratories: Examining the Role of Autonomous Motivation, Psychological Capital and Justice Perceptions

Vishal Gupta

The present study investigates the association between R&D-specific leadership approach developed in the Indian context using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data analyses, employee autonomous motivation, psychological capital, fairness perceptions and creativity. Creativity construct was conceptualized as comprising of both behaviors and outcomes. Creative behaviors comprise of idea development (generation and promotion) behaviors and work engagement, while creative performance was measured using quantifiable outputs. Using survey data from 482 scientists in the Indian R&D laboratories, the study found that leader behaviors are directly related to autonomous motivation and justice perceptions that, in turn, are positively related to psychological capital and creative behaviors. Psychological capital is also positively related to creative behaviors. The study found significant positive relationship between work engagement and creative performance. The results of this study provide support for the leadership model and its association with employee perceptual variables, behaviors and objective performance.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

IIMA in HealthCare Management: Abstract of Publications (2000-2013)

K. V. Ramani

The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), was established in 1961 as an autonomous institution by the Government of India in collaboration with the Government of Gujarat and Indian industry.

IIMA's involvement in the health sector started with the establishment of the Public Systems Group in 1975. In the initial period, our research focused on the management of primary healthcare services and family planning. We expanded our research activities to include the management of secondary healthcare services in the 80s and to tertiary healthcare services in the 90s. Currently our research interests focus on the governance and management issues in the areas on Rural Health, Urban Health, Public Health and Hospital Management.

In June 2004, IIMA Board approved the setting up of a Centre for Management Health Services (CMHS) in recognition of IIMA's contributions to the health sector in the past and the felt need to strengthen the management of health sector in the context of socio-economic developments of our country. The overall objectives of CMHS are to address the managerial challenges in the delivery of health services to respond to the needs of different segments of our population efficiently and effectively, build institutions of excellence in the health sector, and influence health policies and wider environments. All our research projects are externally funded and we have developed research collaborations with 15-20 international universities in USA, UK, Europe, and Asia. CMHS has also established strong linkages with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare at the national and state government levels, particularly in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Orissa, and Bihar.

This working paper is a compilation of the abstracts of all our publications in the last 13 years, which includes 3 books, 50 referred journal articles, 66 Working Papers, 6 Chapters in Books and 25 Case Studies.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

A Framework for Socially Meaningful Evaluations of Technology based Social Innovations

Ankur Sarin and Kavitha Ranganathan

The social innovation space that tries to marry the pursuit of profits and social impact is at interesting cross-roads in developing countries like India. Among other things, the euphoria and subsequent deflation around microfinance, points to the need for a continuous critical examination of not only how well a sector, or organizations within it, are doing on different operational criteria, but also socially locating the evaluative criteria. This implies asking questions of the relevance of metrics being used to evaluate the social problem being targeted, the manner in which the problem is being defined and implications for the relationship between the state and citizens being impacted by private social interventions.
To this end we suggest and test a framework adapted from Fischer (Fischer 1995) that makes a useful distinction between technical verification (performance on indicators relevant to the innovation) and societal validation (relevance of indicators to societal problem being addressed, nature of democratic society promoted etc.) as different levels of evaluation. While most impact reporting standards restrict their scope to technical verification, it is the level of societal validation where most conflicts and controversies lie.
We develop on Fischer's framework in the paper, elaborating on what the different levels of evaluations imply for social enterprises. We elucidate various aspects of the framework with ample examples, drawn from organizations that have garnered attention for their potential to create social impact via the use of technology. Although the scope of the framework is not limited to them, we focus on technology based social innovations in the paper.
We use the framework to both organise the discourse evaluating the impact of the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC), which aims to equip every child in the world with a laptop of his/her own. The purpose of our case study is not to evaluate the OLPC itself, but instead organise the discourse around the impact of OLPC. Therefore, the case study serves to illustrate how the evaluation framework can be used, the manner in which the levels are interrelated, questions that emerge in using the framework and the importance of deliberating on the normative.

Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Balancing U-Shaped Assembly Lines with Resource Dependent Task Times: A Simulated Annealing Approach

Sachin Jayaswal and Prashant Agarwal

The advent of Just-in-Time (JIT) and Group Technology philosophies has popularized U-
shaped assembly lines, which help overcome many of the disadvantages, like line inflexibility,
job monotony, large inventories, etc., typically associated with straight assembly lines. Al-
though U-shaped layout has demonstrated it supremacy over the traditional straight layout,
the problem of U-shaped assembly line balancing (ULB) is much more complex. The extant
literature on ULB assumes that each assembly task requires a fixed (or no) equipment and
a fixed number of workers. However, it is often desirable to reduce certain task times by
assigning more workers or alternative equipments at a given workstation. The problem in
such cases is to assign not only the task but also resource alternatives (number of workers
and equipment type) to workstations. Research on such resource dependent U-shaped assembly line balancing (RDULB) is scarce. We address the problem of RDULB and propose
a Simulated Annealing (SA) based metaheuristic, which gives optimal solution for most of
the small-to-medium problem instances. For very large problems, while SA generates a good
feasible solution within half an hour to 1.5 hours, Cplex is unable to find a single feasible
solution even after 10 times the CPU time required by SA.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Capacitated Multiple Allocation Hub Location with Service Level Constraints for Multiple Consignment Classes

Sachin Jayaswal and Navneet Vidyarthi

Hub-and-spoke systems have wide applications ranging in airline transportation, freight
transportation, urban traffic, postal delivery, telecommunications and distribution in supply
chains. These systems are usually characterized by stochastic demand and congestion, which
adversely affect the quality of service to customers. These systems are further characterized
by different classes of customers who need different levels of service. In this paper, we
study the problem of hub-and-spoke network design under conditions wherein customer
demands are stochastic and consignments from one class are served at hubs with priority
over those from the other class to maintain the different service levels required by them.
We present a model for designing a capacitated multiple allocation hub location problem
with a service level constraint, defined using the distribution of time spent at hubs, for
each priority class. The model seeks to determine the hub-and-spoke network design at
the minimum total cost, which includes the total fixed cost of equipping open hubs with
sufficient processing capacity and the variable transportation costs, subject to a service
level constraint for each consignment class. The network of hubs, given their locations,
is thus modeled as spatially distributed preemptive priority M/M/1 queues. The problem
is challenging to solve, especially in absence of any known analytical expression for the
sojourn time distribution of low priority customers in a preemptive priority M/M/1 queue.
To resolve this problem, we exploit the concavity of the sojourn time distribution of low
priority consignments to eliminate the non-linearity in their service level functions at the
expense of a large number of tangent hyperplanes, which are determined numerically using
matrix geometric method. The problem is solved to optimality using a cutting plane method.
Computational results based on the US Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) data are provided.
The results show that an explicit account for service level constraints at hubs may result in a
significantly different network configuration. Further, it is interesting to note that increasing
the fraction of consignments that receive priority in service or/and that have a lower value
of the maximum threshold on sojourn time may not necessarily increase the total cost of
the network design.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Efficient Solution of a Class of Location-Allocation Problems with Stochastic Demand and Congestion

Navneet Vidyarthi and Sachin Jayaswal

We consider a class of location-allocation problems with immobile servers, stochastic demand and congestion that arises in several planning contexts: location of emergency medical clinics; preventive healthcare centers; refuse collection and disposal centers; stores and service centers; bank branches and automated teller machines; internet mirror sites; and distribution centers in supply chains. The problem seeks to simultaneously locate service facilities, equip them with appropriate capacities, and allocate customer demand to these facilities such that the total cost, which consists of the xed cost of opening facilities with sufficient capacities, the access cost of users travel to facilities, and the queuing delay cost, is minimized. Under Poisson user demand arrivals and general service time distributions, the problem is set up as a network of independent M/G/1 queues, whose locations, capacities and service zones need to be determined. The resulting mathematical model is a non-linear integer program. Using simple transformation and piecewise linear approximation, the model is linearized and solved to -optimality using a constraint generation method. Computational results are presented for instances up to 400 users, 25 potential service facilities, and 5 capacity levels
with different coefficient of variation of service times and average queueing delay costs per customer. The results indicate that the proposed solution method is efficient in solving a wide range of problem instances.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Price and leadtime dierentiation and operations strategy in a competitive market

Sachin Jayaswal

We study a duopoly market in which customers are heterogeneous in their sensitivity
to price and leadtime, and can be segmented as price sensitive or time sensitive. Each
firm tailors (differentiates) its products/services for the two customer classes solely based
on price and the corresponding guaranteed leadtime. Our objective is to understand
how competition affects price and leadtime differentiation of the firms since the extant
literature reports very contradicting results. Our results suggest that when firms use
dedicated resources to serve the two market segments, pure price competition always
tends to decrease individual prices as well as price differentiation, irrespective of the
market behavior. Further, the effect of competition is more pronounced when customers
are allowed to self-select, thereby introducing substitutability between the two product
options. On the other hand, when firms compete in time, in addition to price, the effect of
competition on product differentiation depends crucially on the behavior of the market.
We further use our model to study the effects of asymmetry between the competing firms
on their product differentiation. Our results suggest that the firm with a larger market
base should always maintain a larger price and leadtime differentiation between the two
market segments. Similarly, the firm with a capacity cost advantage should also maintain
a larger leadtime differentiation.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2013

Exact Solution to Bandwidth Packing Problem with Queuing Delays

Navneet Vidyarthi, Sachin Jayaswal, and Vikranth Babu Tirumala Chetty

The bandwidth packing problem seeks to select and route a set of calls from a given list, each
with a pre-specified requirement for bandwidth, on an undirected communication network
such that the revenue generated is maximized. In this paper, we present a model and an
exact solution approach for the bandwidth packing problem with queuing delay costs under
stochastic demand and congestion. We provide a more general model than available in the
extant literature by assuming a general service time distribution on the links. The problem,
under Poison call arrivals, is thus set up as a network of spatially distributed independent
M/G/1 queues. However, the presence of delay cost in the objective function makes the resulting integer programming model nonlinear. We present an exact solution approach based
on piecewise linearization and cutting plane algorithm. Computational results indicate that
the proposed solution method provides optimal solution in reasonable computational times.
Comparisons of our exact solution method with the Lagrangean relaxation based solution
reported in the literature for the special case of exponential service times clearly demonstrate
that our solution approach outperforms the latter, both in terms of the quality of solution
and computational times. Using numerical examples, we demonstrate that the service time
variability, if not correctly represented in the model, can result in a solution very different
from the optimal.

Go to link
Read More
IIMA