Faculty & Research

Research Productive

Show result

Search Query :
Area :
Search Query :
3724 items in total found

Working Papers | 2025

Do Cruelty-Free Practices Matter? The Role of Consumer Speciesism in Differential Preference for Cruelty-Free Products

Anwesha Bandopadhyay, Prof. Sourav Bikash Borah, Prof. Soumya Mukhopadhyay, Prof. Tanvi Gupta

Cruelty-free practices involve avoidance of animal harm during production. While adopting cruelty-free practices by firms is important for sustainability, overcoming consumer indifference towards cruelty-free products is challenging. Through six studies, we show that consumer speciesism (devaluation of other species) moderates the effect of cruelty-free practices on product evaluation. Cruelty-free practices increase purchase intention among low speciesism but not among high speciesism consumers, mediated by perceived brand moral agency. The study examines how cruelty-free brands can create a win-win strategy that benefits the firm and the environment by using anthropomorphized animals in brand communications to attenuate the unfavorable effect of speciesism.

Read More

Working Papers | 2025

Trademarks related to precious metals and jewellery: Empirical Assessment of Class 14 Trademarks in India

M P Ram Mohan, Vijay V Venkitesh and Aditya Gupta

This study explores how the regulation of gold and precious metals serves as a foundation for modern trademark laws. The contemporary trademark systems trace their lineage within the use of hallmarking and production marks within guilds to ensure quality control and accountability. This study combines historical analysis with an empirical review of 4.1 million trademark applications filed in India between 2009 and 2022, focusing on Class 14, which includes jewellery, precious metals, and watches. This study identifies 47,683 trademark applications filed during 2009-2022, corresponding to Class 14. Part 1 of the report provides the context of the study and examines how classification systems were developed, and explains their ubiquity in modern trademark law. Part 2 introduces the project on empirical assessment of trademark laws and explains the methodology and timeline for creating the dataset for the present study. It also gives the necessary context and explains the trademark prosecution process in detail. Part 3 examines the trends and statistics that emerge from the authors’ dataset. It is primarily divided into three parts, which provide insights into general statistics, timelines for the prosecution process of Class 14 marks, and finally, the treatment of Class 14 marks during the examination process of the Trade Marks Registry. The findings are vital for stakeholders navigating trademark registration processes and underscore the need for providing bulk datasets to enable empirical research on trademark systems in India.

Read More

Working Papers | 2025

India’s Gold Trade: Recommendations for the Path Forward in 2025

Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

This paper examines India’s gold trade dynamics in the context of expectations of a rise in customs duty rates in the Union Budget 2025-26. The persistent demand for physical gold in India, which has remained inelastic over time, is largely met through imports due to limited domestic sources. The Government of India has attempted to regulate gold imports through customs duty adjustments, but our findings reveal that such measures have limited long-term effectiveness. Instead, higher rates encourage imports which utilise multi-duty structures. We argue for a structural shift in policy, including eliminating duty differential for all gold-based commodities, fostering strategic mining partnerships with resource-rich nations, and introducing short-term tax amnesty schemes to monetize household gold holdings. Furthermore, our analysis emphasizes the need to complement import management strategies with efforts to enhance exports, particularly in the gems and jewellery sector, which faces significant structural challenges.

Read More

Working Papers | 2024

Liquidated Damages in India: Concepts, Enforceability, and Drafting Considerations

M P Ram Mohan, Gaurav Ray, Promode Murugavelu, & Jeeri Sanjana Reddy

Damages in contract law play a crucial role in compensating parties for losses resulting from breaches of contractual obligations. Liquidated damages clauses promote commercial certainty and party autonomy. Section 74 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 codifies the law on liquidated damages. Over the years, courts have employed several evaluative criteria and interpretative tools when deciding upon the validity, scope and essential aspects of liquidated damages clauses. This paper analyses the principles governing liquidated damages and attempts to use this analysis to provide a guide in drafting a valid and legally enforceable liquidated damages clause.

Read More

Working Papers | 2024

Washed Away: Industrial Capital, Labor, and Floods

Anish Sugathan, Arpit Shah, Deepak Malghan

This study quantifies the dynamic impacts of floods on industrial capital and labor in India using a novel dataset combining geocoded flood events with firm facility-level data from 2000 to 2021. Employing a stacked difference-in-differences approach with carefully matched controls, we uncover persistent negative effects of floods on firms’ assets and employment, with striking heterogeneity across sectors and regions. In the post-flood period, we estimate declines from mean values in total assets of 46.1% (16.68 billion INR ≈ 225 million USD), employment of 49.0% (8.20 thousand workers), and the wage bill of 74.5% (5.52 billion INR ≈ 74 million USD). The sectoral impacts are highly varied: the information technology and communication, manufacturing, and utilities sectors experience significant declines in assets, while the financial services sector exhibits growth. Mapping the spatial distribution of flood events and industrial facilities reveals pronounced regional heterogeneity in flood exposure and economic impacts. Adding nuance to the empirical investigation of the “creative destruction” hypothesis, we find limited evidence of systematic capital reallocation toward better-performing sectors, suggesting instead that floods generate sector-specific impacts with varying recovery patterns. These findings challenge assumptions of rapid post-disaster equilibration and have important implications for policymakers and firm managers in developing sector-specific strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts of floods in an increasingly climate-uncertain world.

Read More

Journal Articles | 2024

Spokesperson effectiveness in B2B advertising: Spokesperson characteristics and posture using eye-tracking

Tanusree Dutta, Subhadip Roy, Soumya Sarkar, Sudipa Nag

This study aims to investigate the nuances of celebrity spokesperson effectiveness in business-to-business (B2B) advertising. Specifically, the study addresses the question of endorser effectiveness in the presence of product complexity (high vs low) and how this effect is moderated by endorser gender. In addition, the study also explores whether the way an endorser is placed in the advertisement (product-facing vs audience-facing) would have differential effects on the buyer.

Read More

Journal Articles | 2024

Consumer perspectives on food traceability—A systematic literature review and future research agenda

Anam Chaudhary, Rajat Sharma, Vidya Vemireddy

Food traceability is a critical approach that ensures the safety and quality of food. It has garnered significant attention, particularly in the aftermath of multiple food safety incidents reported in various countries. While there is extant literature available on consumer perspectives on food traceability, the findings are not consistent across studies. This systematic literature review aims to provide a comprehensive understanding by integrating findings from past studies. It includes 61 articles sourced from two databases, namely Scopus and Web of Science. This review outlines various stages of a consumer's decision for food traceability, starting from exposure, awareness, understanding, liking and disliking, attitudes and preferences, purchase intentions and willingness to pay, to the final purchase. It also identifies the determinants of consumer responses to food traceability, categorising them as factors internal to the consumers, determinants due to the perception of external factors and contextual factors. Moreover, it identifies gaps in the existing research and proposes research questions to expand the knowledge in this area.

Read More

Journal Articles | 2024

Adoption of agronomic practices and their impact on crop yield and income: An analysis for black gram and green gram in India

Poornima Varma, Julius Manda

Black gram and green gram are important pulse crops in India, but their production has faced fluctuations and stagnancy in yields over the last few decades. The Government of India has implemented several measures to enhance crop yield, including recommending and promoting the adoption of crop-specific agronomic practices. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the determinants of the adoption of these practices and their impact on yield and income. In this context, this study analyses the determinants of the adoption of climate and plant management practices among black gram and green gram farmers and their impact on yield, crop revenue and net income across four major crop-producing Indian states using a multinomial endogenous treatment effects model. Our analysis shows that information, contact with government extension services and access to off-farm activities are crucial in adopting climate and plant management practices. The results strengthen the view that the adoption of knowledge-intensive practices happens via formal information sources and plot-level demonstrations. In addition, the results indicate that farmers who experience frequent crop loss exhibit an aversion towards adopting climate and plant management practices. While adopting these practices had a positive impact on crop yield and crop revenue, the impact on net income was observed only in the case of climate management.

Read More

Journal Articles | 2024

What explains rice exports? An analysis of major rice-exporting countries

Poornima Varma

This study examines the drivers of rice trade. The analysis uses the standard comparative advantage model, the Heckscher–Ohlin–Vanek (HOV) framework, supplemented with a gravity-type equation. Using the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation for data from 2002 to 2020, the analysis broadly confirms HOV model predictions. Results indicate that arable land, along with GDP, distance, precipitation and crop season temperature, significantly influences rice trade dynamics. The results showed that the precipitation play a key role in influencing the rice trade rather than the blue water availability. However, agricultural water stress discouraged exports and encouraged imports.

Read More

Journal Articles | 2024

Problem of plenty? Understanding the Impact of choice and information overload on Airbnb bookings

V Athi Karthick, Adrija Majumdar, Indranil Bose

Online sharing platforms offer countless choices and detailed product descriptions to consumers. In this study, we demonstrate the effect of choice and information overload on booking decisions using large-scale field data from Airbnb and observe an inverse U-shaped association. Furthermore, our results show that providing quality assurance of the product exacerbates the choice and information overload relationship. As a post-hoc analysis, we perform topic modeling to gain better insights into how product information influences booking decisions. Specifically, the post-hoc analyses show that the number of topics in the description has a positive association with the number of bookings. Furthermore, topic count moderates the information overload effect by intensifying the influence of product description on the number of bookings. Our findings have important implications for online sharing platforms, service providers, and travelers as they shed light on the detrimental effects of excessive variety and information on booking decisions.

Read More
IIMA