An Epistemological Reflection on Social and Solidarity Economy

Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is emerging as life affirming solutions to the global crises through the multiple ways people locally reinvent economic life on the margins of the capitalist system based on values of solidarity, reciprocity and sustainability. Although the SSE builds on a strong foundation of real practices and institutions of economic transformation as the way forward for us, this paper argues that this world of practice is in need of its theory to frame discourses and engage with the bigger picture with confidence as an alternative to the dominant economic paradigm. The author argues that the orthodox economics, with its ontological construct of the homo economicus, Cartesian dichotomy and logical positivist epistemology severely constrains our abilities to understand and appreciate economic alternatives based on ‘other’ rationalities. Hence, there is a need for an epistemological revolution to construct a coherent theoretical framework from the wreckages of the neoclassical economics for the SSE. This paper seeks to outline the basic structure and the key elements of the ontological and the epistemological framework for this ‘science-in-the-making’ as a step to stimulate further debate for a paradigm revolution.     

Do political determinants affect revenue collection? Evidence from the Indian states

In a recent study, Dash and Raja (2013) have shown that the size and composition of public expenditure of Indian states are systematically linked with political determinants such as the extent of government fragmentation, strength of opposition, electoral years, and ideology. This study extends the questions to whether there are similar links to revenue collections by the governments that rule the different states in India. Using the same time period of the previous study, four revenue measures related to tax collection and internal debt are considered and four different sets of hypotheses are developed by linking the political determinants with each of the revenue measures. The overall findings of the study suggest that the government-specific political determinants are significant and robust determinants of revenue collections of the Indian states.     

Entrepreneurial team's risk-based decision-making: A dynamic game analysis

It is well-known that some cognitive factors such as opportunity perception and risk perception influence entrepreneurial risk-based decision-making (RBDM). This paper proposes some rules of entrepreneur's risk decision-learning to address this RBDM taking cognitive factors into consideration. The learning mechanisms of entrepreneurial team's RBDM is derived based on entrepreneur's perception evolution. The paper employs a system dynamics model to analyze the entrepreneurial team's risk decision-learning. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the entrepreneurial RBDM process with cognitive factors.     

Asymmetric effects of exchange rate movements on traditional and modern services exports: Evidence from a large emerging economy

The service sector in India has emerged as the ‘new engine of growth’ with an increasing share in output and exports. In this paper we analyse the effect of real exchange rate movements on service exports of India, incorporating goods exports, financial development, FDI inflows, world demand and the role of globalization as drivers. We find that while traditional service exports are negatively and significantly affected by the real exchange rate movements, the modern service exports are negatively but not significantly affected. By applying the asymmetric cointegration approach, the results also confirm the non-existence of any asymmetric relationship between the real exchange rate and service exports in India. Further, the results also show that the supply augmenting and demand-side factors are more dominant than the exchange rate to affect service exports from India.     

Introduction to special section on “Risk and Technology”

Technology has grown rapidly, a characteristic of our advancing civilization. Technology provides many valuable tools, but also introduces new risks. This special section of Technological Forecasting and Social Change provides the state of the art studies of risk and technology management.     

Political competitiveness and the private–public structure of public expenditure: a model and empirics for the Indian States

Studies of government size usually try to identify the factors that explain what parts of economic activity are brought within the public sector and what parts are left strictly in private hands. Modern governments are now so large that the question of what determines the private/public composition, or privateness, of public expenditure is of comparable importance for understanding the role of government in society. In this paper, we use a model of the composition of public budgets to uncover the importance of electoral competitiveness and other factors in the evolution of the privateness of public expenditure across the Indian states. These states vary widely in their socioeconomic characteristics while sharing a common political heritage based on parliamentary government. New measures of public expenditure on private targetable goods and of electoral competitiveness at the Indian state level accompany the paper along with a primer on Indian public finance accounting practices in an Online Appendix. The empirical analysis shows that the degree of privateness in India’s more developed states falls substantially with greater political competition and with rising incomes, while in the less developed states it responds more weakly to these key factors and in some cases even inversely.

     

The effect of reducing risk and improving personal motivation on the adoption of knowledge repository system

The role of Knowledge Repository Systems (KRSs) is to provide the exchanging intermediaries of explicit knowledge between knowledge contributors and knowledge seekers to assist knowledge sharing of employees in the organization. However, there is still a lack of deep understanding of how to reduce perceived risk and improve personal motivation on the adoption of KRSs in previous research. The paper presents social-psychological-technical perspectives to integrate social factors of reduced perceived risk (trust and organizational support) into Motivation Model (MM) and develop a comprehensive framework for assessing and analyzing the interaction of technology with the social, psychological, and behavioral aspects in KRSs. The proposed framework is validated with 528 respondents from teaching hospitals located in Taiwan, which shows that social factors of reduced perceived risk, personal motivation factors, and technology quality factors are three key factors affecting the acceptance of the KRSs. In other words, technological, social, psychological aspects will affect simultaneously behavioral intention in KRSs. Moreover, the psychological aspects are important mediators among technological, social, and behavioral aspects. The findings may be used as theoretical base for future research and offer empirical foresight to managers of organizations in assessing and evaluating the performance of the KRSs.     

Do political determinants affect the size and composition of public expenditure? A study of the Indian states

This study examines whether there exists a systematic link between the size and composition of public expenditure and the political determinants across the Indian states. Three types of political determinants—forms of governments, government’s ideology, and electoral cycle—are identified and three sets of hypotheses are designed linking these characteristics with three different measures of public expenditure. The hypotheses are tested using a panel dataset of 14 Indian states spread over 27 fiscal years, from 1980–1981 to 2006–2007. The overall findings of the study suggest that the relationship between expenditure measures and political determinants across the Indian states validates the proposed hypotheses even after controlling for the traditional and other unobservable determinants. These findings are robust to various forms of sensitivity analysis.     

An integrated product planning model for pricing and bundle selection using Markov decision processes and data envelope analysis

When bundling products during the product planning stage, there are a number of possible combinations that can be offered to customers. Consider a firm that offers N distinctive products, then there are 2^N−(N+1) possible bundling combinations. Now, if we wish to make pricing and bundle selection decisions, keeping in my mind limited inventory and a finite time horizon, then the size of the state space could be very large and finding an optimal solution could be impossible. To tackle this issue, we formulate an integrated model that utilizes a Markov decision process and data envelope analysis. Bundle selections are made using data envelope analysis in each decision epoch. Once the efficient bundles are selected they are priced by solving a Markov decision process using dynamic programming. Numerical examples are solved to exhibit the model's potential in solving real-world problems.