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3721 items in total found

Journal Articles | 2022

Polarised social media discourse during COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from YouTube

Samrat Gupta, Gaurav Jain, and Amit Anand Tiwari

Behaviour & Information Technology

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted significant attention on social media platforms as these platforms provide users unparalleled access to ‘information’ from around the globe. In spite of demographic differences, people have been expressing and shaping their opinions using social media on topics ranging from the plight of migrant workers to vaccine development. However, the social media induced polarisation owing to selective online exposure to information during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a major cause of concern for countries across the world. In this paper, we analyse the temporal dynamics of polarisation in online discourse related to the COVID-19. We use random network theory-based simulation to investigate the evolution of opinion formation in comments posted on different COVID-19-related YouTube videos. Our findings reveal that as the pandemic unfolded, the extent of polarisation in the online discourse increased with time. We validate our experimental model using real-world complex networks and compare consensus formation on these networks with equivalent random networks. This study has several implications as polarisation around socio-cultural issues in crises such as pandemic can exacerbate the social divide. The framework proposed in this study can aid regulatory agencies to take required actions and mitigate social media-induced polarisation.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Exploring reasons for MD-PhD trainees’ experiences of impostor phenomenon

Devasmita Chakraverty, Jose E. Cavazos, and Donna B. Jeffe

BMC Medical Education

Background

Acceptance into U.S. MD-PhD dual-degree programs is highly competitive, and the lengthy training program requires transitioning between multiple phases (pre-clinical-, PhD-research-, and clinical-training phases), which can be stressful. Challenges faced during MD-PhD training could exacerbate self-doubt and anxiety. Impostor phenomenon is the experience of feeling like a fraud, with some high-achieving, competent individuals attributing their successes to luck or other factors rather than their own ability and hard work. To our knowledge, impostor phenomenon among MD-PhD trainees has not been described. This study examined impostor phenomenon experiences during MD-PhD training and reasons trainees attributed to these feelings.

Methods

Individuals in science and medicine fields participated in an online survey that included the 20-item Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS); higher scores (range 20–100) indicate more frequent impostor phenomenon. Some respondents who reported experiencing impostor phenomenon also voluntarily completed a semi-structured interview, sharing experiences during training that contributed to feelings of impostor phenomenon. Interview transcripts were coded and analysed using the constant comparative method and analytic induction to identify themes.

Results

Of 959 survey respondents (students and professionals in science and medicine), 13 MD-PhD students and residents completed the survey, nine of whom (five male, four female; four white, five other race-ethnicity) also completed an interview. These participants experienced moderate-to-intense scores on the CIPS (range: 46–96). Four themes emerged from the interview narratives that described participants’ experiences of IP: professional identity formation, fear of evaluation, minority status, and, program-transition experiences. All reported struggling to develop a physician-scientist identity and lacking a sense of belonging in medicine or research.

Conclusions

Impostor experiences that MD-PhD participants attributed to bias and micro-aggressions in social interactions with peers, faculty, and patients challenged their professional identity formation as physician-scientists. It is important to further examine how MD-PhD-program structures, cultures, and social interactions can lead to feelings of alienation and experiences of impostor phenomenon, particularly for students from diverse and underrepresented populations in medicine.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Modeling landside container terminal queues: Exact analysis and approximations

Debjit Roy, Jan-Kees van Ommeren, René De Koster, and Amir Gharehgozli Ommeren

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological

With the growth of ocean transport and with increasing vessel sizes, managing congestion at the landside of container terminals has become a major challenge. The landside of a sea terminal handles containers that arrive or depart via train or truck. Large sea terminals have to handle thousands of trucks and dozens of trains per day. As trains run on fixed schedule, their containers are prioritized in stacking and internal transport handling. This has consequences for the service of external trucks, which might be subject to delays. We analyze the impact of prioritization on such delays using a stochastic stylized semi-open queuing network model with bulk arrivals (of containers on trains), shared stack crane resources, and multi-class containers. We use the theory of regenerative processes and Markov chain analysis to analyze the network. The proposed network solution algorithm works for large-scale systems and yields sufficiently accurate estimates for performance measurement. The model can capture priority service for containers at the shared stack cranes, while preserving strict handling priorities. The model is used to explore the choice of different internal transport vehicles (with coupled versus decoupled operations at the stack and train gantry cranes) to understand the effect on delays. Our results show that decoupled transport vehicles in comparison to coupled vehicles can mitigate the external truck container handling delays at shared stack cranes by a large extent (up to 12%). However, decoupled vehicles marginally increase the train container handling delays at shared stack cranes (up to 6%). When train arrival rates are low, prioritizing the handling of train containers at the stack cranes significantly reduces their delays. Further, such prioritization hardly delays external truck containers.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Loading and unloading trains at the landside of container terminals

Amir Gharehgozli, Debjit Roy, Suruchika Saini, and Jan-Kees van Ommeren

Maritime Economics & Logistics

We study the operational problem of loading and unloading trains at a container terminal. Trains are served by two gantry cranes which spread over multiple trains on parallel tracks at the terminal landside. Multiple straddle carriers are available to move containers between the stacking area and drop off locations perpendicular to the train tracks. The trains must be loaded and unloaded with given departure times. We develop a mixed-integer programming model to schedule the gantry cranes and straddle carriers to load and unload the trains. The objective is to minimize the total delay of trains. Due to the complexity involved, the problem is solved using a simulated annealing heuristic. We perform extensive numerical experiments to analyze the impact of different variables and parameters on minimizing the total delay. More specifically, the impact of three variables including the number of trains, containers on trains, and available straddle carriers are evaluated.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Dynamic vehicle allocation policies for shared autonomous electric fleets

Yuxuan Dong, René De Koster, Debjit Roy, and Yugang Yu

Transportation Science

In the future, vehicle sharing platforms for passenger transport will be unmanned, autonomous, and electric. These platforms must decide which vehicle should pick up which type of customer based on the vehicle’s battery level and customer’s travel distance. We design dynamic vehicle allocation policies for matching appropriate vehicles to customers using a Markov decision process model. To obtain the model parameters, we first model the system as a semi-open queuing network (SOQN) with multiple synchronization stations. At these stations, customers with varied battery demands are matched with semi-shared vehicles that hold sufficient remaining battery levels. If a vehicle’s battery level drops below a threshold, it is routed probabilistically to a nearby charging station for charging. We solve the analytical model of the SOQN and obtain approximate system performance measures, which are validated using simulation. With inputs from the SOQN model, the Markov decision process minimizes both customer waiting cost and lost demand and finds a good heuristic vehicle allocation policy. The experiments show that the heuristic policy is near optimal in small-scale networks and outperforms benchmark policies in large-scale realistic scenarios. An interesting finding is that reserving idle vehicles to wait for future short-distance customer arrivals can be beneficial even when long-distance customers are waiting.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Earnings-based borrowing constraints & corporate investments in 2007–2009 financial crisis

Ankitkumar Kariya

Journal of Corporate Finance

Recent work on the debt composition of non-financial firms finds that most of the large firms’ debt is cash flow-based with earnings-based borrowing constraints (EBCs), limiting the maximum debt relative to firms’ EBITDA. During the 2007–2009 crisis, EBCs tightened in the leveraged loan market. Consistent with the reduction in the supply of credit, I find that investments and debt issues of firms with binding EBCs reduce significantly compared to control firms. Furthermore, firms with binding EBCs cut their share repurchases and total payout during the crisis. In the cross-section, the reduction in investments and total payout is larger in the subsample of firms whose marginal borrowings are more likely to come from cash flow-based debt.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Policy uncertainty and behavior of foreign firms in emerging economies

Amit Karna and Shamim S. Mondal Viswanath Pingali

Management Decision

Purpose – This study aims to examine how foreign and domestic firms react to policy uncertainty in an emerging economy. In addition, the study investigates if older foreign firms better adapt to policy uncertainty than newer entrants. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses pharmaceutical sales data on India’s cardiovascular segment for January 2011–May 2016. The authors use fixed fixed-effects panel data regression to measure the market reactions of foreign and domestic firms faced with policy uncertainty.

Findings – While domestic and foreign firms react similarly to anticipated policy changes, foreign firms react more adversely to policy uncertainty. Among foreign firms, early entrants respond less adversely than new entrants.

Research limitations/implications – Foreign firms are able to cope with anticipated policy changes in similar vein as the domestic firms by way of a priori reading of the host country’s regulatory landscape. The foreign firms’ response to policy uncertainty is significantly different from domestic firms. The difference between the market response of foreign and domestic firms decreases over time.

Practical implications – The authors’ findings demonstrate that adaptability is the key for new foreign firms to face policy uncertainty. Foreign firms can respond to policy changes, especially the unanticipated ones by imbibing local practices. Social implications – The authors’ findings suggest that enhanced policy uncertainty hurts foreign firms more adversely than domestic firms, and newer foreign firms are more hurt with policy uncertainty than the existing ones. Such uncertainty could also have unintended consequences for consumer welfare.

Originality/value – The authors’ study uses two natural experiments in the same industry within short periods of time. The comparison offers key insights on the differences in domestic and foreign firm responses to the two types of policy uncertainty.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Imprinting effects of exposure to the Indian independence movement on export intensity of firms

Saikat Banerjee, Amit Karna, and Sunil Sharma

Journal of Business Research

Extending the concept of historical imprinting and organizational learning, we propose that the prior exposure to the Indian independence movement negatively influences the export intensity of firms. Firm-specific characteristics such as business group affiliation and entrepreneurial orientation act as dynamics of amplification and encourage to utilize the organizational learning gained from the historical imprinting. Business group affiliation strengthens the negative relationship between prior exposure to the Indian independence movement and export intensity. Entrepreneurial orientation strengthens the moderating effect of business group affiliation and prior exposure to the Indian independence movement on export intensity resulting in a three-way interaction effect. We test the hypotheses using panel data of 1,817 Indian firm-year observations for 309 firms from 2007 to 2016. We also discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.

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Journal Articles | 2022

Work from home amenability and venture capital financing during COVID-19

Jagriti Srivastava and Balagopal Gopalakrishnan

Applied Economics

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on venture capital financing of firms. We find a significant shift in the profile of firms that obtain venture capital financing during the pandemic-induced economic crisis. Firms in industries that are more amenable to work from home obtain greater amounts of financing. Growth-stage firms operating in amenable industries are able to obtain higher financing than early-stage firms. The higher financing obtained by firms in amenable industries is driven by venture capital funds focused on the domestic market. Additionally, the higher financing is obtained from a single venture capital investor rather than a consortia of investors. Taken together, the preference of venture capital funds indicate a less risk-averse behavior in financing firms amenable to remote working. The findings of our study using monthly firm-level data provide insights on venture capital financing during the pandemic.

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Journal Articles | 2022

From fear to courage: Indian lesbians’ and gays’ quest for Inclusive ethical organizations

Ernesto Noronha, Nidhi S. Bisht, and Premilla D’Cruz

Journal of Business Ethics

This paper focusses on the experiences of Indian lesbians and gays (LGs) who are subjected to unethical acts of workplace bullying which get manifested through constant guesswork, comments and questioning about their sexual identity in the hostile Indian context. Given this, LG participants usually opt for secrecy and lead a double life, using ‘passing’ and ‘covering’ strategies to manage economic, social and psychological risks. Nonetheless, this paper rewrites the negative tenor of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals research by underscoring how LG participants move from fear to courage in their endeavour to live authentic lives while considering the broader organizational and social context. We argue that their courage is manifested mainly through deliberate micro-disclosures and a sense of defiance which can be enhanced if organizations are designed to be more inclusive and ethical. Consequently, participants defined inclusive ethical organizations as having conducive environments with trustworthy, supportive, secure, fair, unbiased and safe non-discriminatory policies open to the idea of diverse sexual orientations. Our findings point to the fact that, first and foremost, organizations must be crafted and sustained to be courageous within a hostile social climate, for employees to overcome their fears.

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IIMA