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3846 items in total found

Working Papers | 2000

Attitudes towards work and family roles and their implications for career growth of women

Deepti Bhatnagar and Rajadhyaksha U

In this paper the authors attempted to understand attitudes towards work and family roles of professional men and women in India. Propositions based on the adult development theories of men and women, regarding reward value derived from and commitment made to the occupational, parental, marital and homemaker roles over the life cycle, were tested. Results indicated that there was no change with age, in attitudes towards the occupational and homemaker roles. Instead, attitudes towards these roles differed according to respondent's sex. Attitudes towards the marital and parental roles varied across the life cycle, though not in keeping with propositions based on the adult development theories of men and women. There was no reversal in attitudes towards work and family roles of men and women after mid-life. Rather, some reversal in attitudes appeared to occur between the marital and parental roles, over the life span of both men and women. Results are reviewed within the Indian context and their implications for the career development of women are discussed.

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Working Papers | 2000

Leadership Styles and Influence Tactics

Parvinder Gupta and J. B. P. Sinha

Two hundred nine MBA (Masters in Business Administration) students of a management institute rated their leadership styles and influence tactics as a part of their classroom exercise. The findings indicated that they preferred to adopt nurturant-task (NT) and participative styles more frequently than transformational style. Authoritarian style of leadership was least likely to be adopted by them. The first three styles were positively correlated suggesting the possibility of leaders moving back and forth between the styles. Rational persuasion and empowerment were most likely to be used as influence tactics, followed by personal appeal and consultation, reward for performance, use of authority, and so on. Although leadership styles were meaningfully related to influence tactics, there were enough overlaps to suggest that leaders flexibly use styles and influence tactics.

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Working Papers | 2000

Managerial Compensation in India: A Test of Alternative Models

Bhattacherjee Debashish and Manjari Singh

This study attempts to econometrically model the determinants of managerial compensation in the Indian economy making use of a pooled cross-section and time-series data base that consists of 157 managers from eight companies for the time period 1977-97. The paper tests for the empirical validity of four alternative models/explanations of corporate compensation: firm performance, managerial discretionary power, human capital, and the tournament-based pay structure. The earning equations are developed for testing the various hypotheses and a generalised linear regression framework is used for analysing the data.

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Working Papers | 2000

Some Solutions for Abstract Games: Axiomatic Characterisations

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we consider binary relations which are reflexive and complete. Such binary relations are referred to in the literature as abstract games. Given an abstract game a (game) solution is a function which associates to each subset a non-empty collection of points of the subset. An important consequence of this framework is that often, a set may fail to have an element which is best with respect to the given binary relation. To circumvent this problem the concept of the top cycle set is introduced, which selects from among the feasible alternatives only those which are best with respect to the transitive closure of the given relation. The top cycle set is always non-empty and in this paper we provide an axiomatic characterization of the top-cycle solution. It is subsequently observed that the top cycle solution is the coarsest solution which satisfies two innocuous assumptions. In the final section of this paper we address the problem of axiomatically characterizing the uncovered solution (where 'covering' is now defined as a 'menu-based' concept).

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Working Papers | 2000

Preservation of Proximity and Merging Functions

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we are interested in a property due to Baigent (1987) called proximity preserving. In the conventional model of voting theory it was proposed by Baigent that aggregation procedures should be proximity preserving in the sense that given three preference profiles if the second is closer to the first than the third according to an additively separable metric then the second social ranking should also be closer to the first social ranking compared to the third social ranking. In this framework distance between profiles is measured as the sum of distances between the preferences of each agent. In this paper we assume a metric on the space of alternatives and thereby generate an entire family of metrics on ballot profiles. An interesting special case of our family of metrics is the distance between two profiles measured as the sum of the distances between the candidates of each agent on the two ballot profiles. In this framework we obtain the result that there is no merging function which satisfies anonymity and the proximity preservation property. A particular case of a merging function is when the universal set of alternatives is finite and the elected outcome is required to be a candidate who must have received at least one vote. We call such merging functions vote aggregators. It therefore follows as a consequence of the above result that there is no vote aggregator which satisfies anonymity and the proximity preservation property. Two similar results, one about social welfare functions and the other about social decision functions can be found in Baigent (1987). However, not only is the context of our analysis different, but the method of proof bears little resemblance to the ones available in the work just cited.

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Working Papers | 2000

A Survey of Mathematical Programming Applications In Integrated Steel Plants

Robert Fourer and Goutam Dutta

Mathematical programming techniques were used in the steel industry as early as 1958, and many applications of optimization in steel production have been reported since then. In this survey, we summarize published applications in the largest steel plants by type, including national steel planning, product mix optimization, blending, scheduling, set covering, and cutting stock.

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Working Papers | 2000

Axiomatic Analysis of Choosing The Second Best

Lahiri Somdeb

The dominant theme in decision theory has been the one where an agent chooses what is perceived to be the best outcome out of a (finite) set of outcomes. This has been the model that economic theory has traditionally favored. In a paper by Baigent and Gaertner (1996) we find a departure from this theme. It is argued there that if there is a unique best outcome then often one may forgo one's claim to it out of politeness. A similar consideration is that of altruism which manifests itself in similar behavior. However, can there be no other type of consideration which prompts one to judiciously avoid the best? In this paper we provide two axiomatic characterizations of the decision rule which invariably selects the second best alternative. Unlike Baigent and Gaertner (1996) we restrict ourselves to the situation where no two alternatives share the same rank.

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Working Papers | 2000

Building Technological Capabilities In a Liberalising Developing Economy: Firm Strategies and Public Policy

Pankaj Chandra and Rakesh Basant

As a consequence of economic reforms, the Indian manufacturing sector faces a variety of technology related challenges. It not only has to quickly develop world-class manufacturing capabilities, but also gear up to develop new products and processes. In this paper we analyse the technology strategies of six Indian firms in different product groups which are trying to build competitive manufacturing & technology capabilities. The linkages between corporate, technology, and manufacturing strategies are explored and the role of complementary assets is studied in order to identify patterns through which these firms are building capabilities of various kinds. Specifically, we evaluate the extent to which firms use supply chains to develop product & process technologies. Some links between public policy and firm level technological capabilities are also explored to identify a few key priorities in the current context.

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Working Papers | 2000

The Orlovsky Solution for Acyclic Comparison Functions

Lahiri Somdeb

In this paper we characterise the Orlovsky solution and what we refer to as the family of threshold solutions. Our family of threshold solutions are somewhat larger than the family of solutions which select only those alternatives that secure a certain prespecified proportion of the votes against all other alternatives. Our family of threshold solutions also include ones which select only those alternatives that exceed a certain prespecified proportion of the votes against all other alternatives. This is the price we pay for ommitting continuity from our axiomatic characterizations.

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Working Papers | 2000

Achieve Zero Customer Dissatisfaction for Corporate Immortality

Ramachandran K

Growing environmental turbulence has made the challenge to keep customers satisfied all the more difficult. Corporate mortality of firms including those favoured by customers is not under control. There seems to be conceptual and methodological weaknesses in the approaches currently used by corporations to achieve customer satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a new concept, "Zero Customer Dissatisfaction" (ZCD). The objective in this approach is to identify customer dissatisfaction from the perspective of organisational strategy and eliminate it entirely as it emerges. The argument for ZCD originates from the concept of latent demand or a demand, which is existing but not yet exploited by any firm. In the ZCD approach, the sources of dissatisfaction can be internal or external to the organisation, and modifications on the value chain may be required to achieve ZCD. Identification of customer dissatisfaction has always been challenging. Drawing from anthropological literature, participant observation is found to be very appropriate to study customers, both internal and external on the value chain. This technique can be used along with other existing methodologies. The paper goes beyond the term of marketing and other specific functions, and identifies ZCD approach as the route to ensure corporate immortality. The paper draws on experiences of a number of companies to support the arguments.

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