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3721 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2024

Product market shock, stakeholder relationships, and trade credit

Jagriti Srivastava, Balagopal Gopalakrishnan, Rajesh Tharyan

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an extremely rare instance of a shock to global product markets. Using quarterly data for a sample of 7397 firms from 54 countries over the period 2017–2020, we study the causal impact of this shock on trade credit. Employing a difference-in-difference analysis, we find that, in contrast to findings in the literature on financial market shocks, low-credit quality firms are credit-rationed by their suppliers during a shock to product markets and that for low-credit quality firms, there is no substitution of trade credit with financial credit. Importantly, however, our analysis shows that low-credit quality firms with better stakeholder relations are able to obtain more trade credit than those with weaker stakeholder relations. Our results are robust to alternative definitions of key variables, alternative methodologies that address endogeneity concerns, a placebo test, stage of market development, and various levels of controls for unobserved heterogeneity. We show that trade credit is conditional on product market conditions and is not always a generous substitute for financial credit. However, maintaining good relations with stakeholders serves as an antidote to the adverse effect of product market shocks on trade credit.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Opening first-party App resources: Empirical evidence of freerRiding

Franck Soh, Pankaj Setia, Varun Grover

Platform owners are releasing their own apps on their platforms. These first-party apps (FPAs) typically leverage platform resources more effectively, competitively threatening rivals. Although the impact of FPAs on rivals’ innovation has been the subject of extensive study, the dominant view in previous research assumes that these FPAs are closed to third-party apps (TPAs). However, there is an increasing trend of FPAs opening their resources to TPAs, as they provide application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing TPAs to access their resources. Rivals still exist, as many TPAs choose not to have access to FPAs’ open resources because of their limited control over these resources. Does opening an FPA’s resources impact rivals’ innovation? The answer to the question is largely unknown. We exploit the release of the Apple Health Records API, a feature that opens Apple Health Records to TPAs, to design a quasi-experiment that investigates whether and how opening an FPA’s resources influence rivals’ innovations. Through several analyses, we conclude that opening an FPA’s resources to TPAs generates free-riding benefits for rivals. Moreover, these benefits mainly arise because of the growing presence of TPAs that do not adopt FPAs’ open resources in the market. We discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications of our findings.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Multi-plant firms and the heavy tail of firm size distribution

Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Shekhar Tomar

The right tail of the firm size distribution has a heavy tail. The origin of this phenomenon, especially the specific characteristics of firms driving this pattern, remain a subject of extensive debate. Previous work has shown that plant size distribution has thinner tails than firm size distribution, indicating the role of multi-plant firms. However, we do not know whether this phenomenon is simply a mechanical effect arising from aggregation across multiple plants or whether the plants of multi-plant firms are different from those of single-plant firms. Using novel data with plant-to-firm mapping, we document that plants of multi-plant firms are more heavy-tailed than single-plant firms, indicating the dominance of the selection effect at the intensive margin. Extensive margin via aggregation of sales at the firm level plays a less crucial role than the selection effect. Importantly, single-plant exporters have a thinner tail than multi-plant non-exporters, suggesting a more dominant role of multi-plant identity than export identity in explaining heavy tails.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Addressing difficulties with abstract thinking for low-literate, low-income consumers through marketplace literacy: A bottom-up approach to consumer and marketing education

Madhu Viswanathan, Saravana Jaikumar, Arun Sreekumar, Shantanu Dutta, Adam Duhachek

We examine a bottom-up approach to consumer and marketing education for subsistence consumers, that is, those with low income and relatively lower literacy levels. They face a variety of cognitive and other constraints, with difficulty in abstract thinking being a central issue that is critical for effective decision-making. We study the impact of marketplace literacy education, with its unique bottom-up approach, on abstract thinking in the consumer domain. We test the effectiveness of a bottom-up educational approach, which covers concrete examples before abstract concepts, compared to the reverse sequence of a top-down approach. We find that the bottom-up approach in marketplace literacy education leads to more abstract thinking in the consumer domain compared to a top-down approach. We discuss the implications of this research for consumer affairs.

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Journal Articles | 2024

An exact method for trilevel hub location problem with interdiction

Prasanna Ramamoorthy, Sachin Jayaswal, Ankur Sinha, Navneet Vidyarthi

In this paper, we study the problem of designing a hub network that is robust against deliberate attacks (interdictions). The problem is modeled as a three-level, two-player Stackelberg game, in which the network designer (defender) acts first to locate hubs to route a set of flows through the network. The attacker (interdictor) acts next to interdict a subset of the located hubs in the designer’s network, followed again by the defender who routes the flows through the remaining hubs in the network. We model the defender’s problem as a trilevel optimization problem, wherein the attacker’s response is modeled as a bilevel hub interdiction problem. We study such a trilevel problem on three variants of hub location problems studied in the literature namely: p-hub median problem, p-hub center, and p-hub maximal covering problems. We present a cutting plane based exact method to solve the problem. The cutting plane method uses supervalid inequalities, which is obtained from the solution of the lower level interdiction problem. To solve the lower level hub interdiction problem efficiently, we propose a penalty-based reformulation of the problem. Using the reformulation, we present a branch-and-cut based exact approach to solve the problem efficiently. We conduct experiments to show the computational advantages of the above algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, the cutting plane approach proposed in this paper is among the first exact method to solve trilevel location–interdiction problems. Our computational results show interesting implications of incorporating interdiction risks in the hub location problem.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Women’s empowerment and intra-household diet diversity across the urban continuum: Evidence from India's DHS

Soumya Gupta, Payal Seth, Vidya Vemireddy, Prabhu Pingali

Women’s empowerment has been associated with improved nutritional outcomes in various settings. However, the gains from empowerment do not necessarily accrue to different members of the same household in the same manner. Furthermore, the relationship between empowerment and nutrition itself is likely to be shaped by the overall level of development in a given region. This paper investigates the heterogeneity in the association between women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI) and quality of intra-household diets between men and women when spatial variations in the levels of urbanization are accounted for, in India. We use intrahousehold dietary intake data for 60,000 men and women from the fourth round of India’s National Family Health Survey and conceptualize women’s empowerment using the women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI). We use geospatial data on nightlights as a proxy for the urban continuum. Nightlights intensity (NTL) captures the growth of smaller towns (between large urban cities and rural areas) that has characterized urbanization in India. A multilevel modeling approach indicates that a unit increase in WENI scores is associated with an improvement in women’s diet diversity scores by 0.19 units, with no significant association for men’s diet diversity. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this finding holds at all NTL terciles. Alongside the role of WENI, we find that a doubling of NTL is associated with an increase in diet diversity scores by atleast 7–8% for both men and women, across wealth quintiles. These results emphasize the need for targeted approaches based on spatial heterogeneity in growth and development within a country when investing in the empowerment-nutrition pathway.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Contests within and between groups: Theory and experiment

Puja Bhattacharya, Jeevant Rampal

We examine behavior in a two-stage group contest where intra-group contests are followed by an inter-group contest. Rewards accrue to the winning group, with winners of the intra-group contest within that group receiving a greater reward. The model generates a discouragement effect, where losers from the first stage exert less effort in the second stage than winners. In contrast to the related literature, we show that a prior win may be disadvantageous, generating lower profits for first stage winners as compared to losers. We consider exogenous asymmetry between groups arising from a biased group contest success function. Although the asymmetry occurs in the second stage, its effect plays out in the first stage, with higher intra-group conflict in the advantaged group. Experimental results support the qualitative predictions of the model. However, losers from the first stage bear a higher burden of the group contribution than the theoretical prediction.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Inhalant abuse among street-involved children and adolescents in India: Case for epistemic recognition and reorientation

Ajazuddin Shaikh, Ankur Sarin

Contextualizing the void of research on inhalant abuse among adolescents as epistemic neglect, in this study, we use mixed-methods action research to understand inhalant abuse in a specific context in the Global South. Focusing on a large metropolitan city in Western India, we surveyed 158 street-involved children and adolescents (110 boys and 48 girls, age range from 5 to 17 years) in a group setting along with follow-up group interviews. Despite finding a high prevalence rate of inhalant abuse, our work suggests an absence of supporting structures and emphasizes the need to revisit our understanding and interpretation of substance-using behavior of street-involved youth. Instead of explaining inhalant-abusing behavior as emerging from pathological deficiencies in individuals or households, we stress the need to critically examine the exploitative environment they are embedded in. In doing so, we join efforts to decolonize conventional ways of understanding “deviant” behavior.

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Journal Articles | 2024

Stochastic modeling of integrated order fulfillment processes with delivery time promise: Order picking, batching, and last-mile delivery

Gyanesh Raj, Debjit Roy, Rene de Koster, Vishal Bansal

To guarantee high customer service and short and accurate lead times, many e-commerce retailers have started to home deliver their customer orders within a few hours or even minutes, also known as quick-commerce order fulfillment. Quick-commerce order fulfillment consists of three main processes: order picking in the warehouse, order batching for delivery, and last-mile delivery. The ultimate delivery performance depends on managing all three processes, which are highly stochastic, and interdependent. We capture this stochasticity and interdependency in an integrated analytical framework and derive approximate analytical expressions for the mean and variance of the total order fulfillment time. We validate the analytical expressions with both in-house detailed process simulations and external-party output measures. We then analyze the delivery cost-service quality trade-offs using an optimization model that minimizes the expected order fulfillment cost with a delivery probability (DP) constraint, focusing on meeting delivery time deadlines. The optimization model determines the number of pickers, the optimal delivery batch size, and the number of vehicles required to deliver the customer orders. Achieving a high delivery reliability comes at a cost. In comparison to the model with DP constraints, we observe that the expected order fulfillment cost averaged over all data parameter settings obtained from the model without DP constraints is 8.9% lower; however, the mean and standard deviation of order fulfillment time increase by 44.1% and 18.6%, respectively, which results in low delivery reliability. We further demonstrate that an integrated analysis of the order fulfillment process is essential to set reliable fulfillment due times.

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| 2024

COVID-19 pandemic intensity, migration status, and household financial vulnerability: Evidence from India

Sanket Mohapatra, Akshita Nigania

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