<Emphasis Type="Italic">Sylvania’s</Emphasis> Indian Precursor and Its Legacy

The starting point of this paper is a January 1977 judgment of the Indian Supreme Court, which applied the rule of reason to vertical restraints and anticipated many of the arguments of the Sylvania judgment. After summarizing the background of the Indian case, I set out the main points of similarity and difference between the two judgments, and finally assess the somewhat erratic influence of post-Sylvania antitrust thinking on Indian competition law and jurisprudence.     

Price transmission,asymmetric adjustment and threshold effects in the cotton supply chain: a case study for Vidarbha,India

This study examines price transmission asymmetries in Vidarbha's (India) cotton supply chain from 2002 to 2012. The analysis takes account of thresholds in price adjustments toward their long‐run equilibrium. The first stage considers the price dynamics between international and Indian domestic cotton prices. The second stage considers price transmission from domestic to farm gate cotton prices in Vidarbha. Results from the first stage indicate that Indian and international cotton markets are well‐integrated. In contrast, the second stage reveals significant threshold‐type nonlinearities as well as asymmetries in price transmission between domestic and farm gate prices. The short‐run dynamics suggest that the pass‐through from domestic to farm gate prices is larger when domestic prices decrease than when they increase. Moreover, back of the envelope calculations suggest that the loss in revenue for a typical farmer from a decrease in domestic price is larger than the gains from an increase in domestic price of the same magnitude. The implication is that traders benefit from price fluctuations at the expense of farmers. Evidence from fieldwork in Vidarbha suggest that asymmetries revealed in this analysis may be linked to trader's market power and inadequate market information among farmers.     

Heterogeneity in Food Demand among Rural Indian Households: The Role of Demographics

Food expenditures, influenced by social, demographic, and economic factors, constitute a significant proportion of the typical rural Indian's household income. Based on cross‐sectional household data, this study employs the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System to estimate food demand among rural Indian households. Special attention is given to the rural household's two‐stage budgeting in total food expenditure and then to a demand for a specific food item. Conditional and unconditional expenditure and price elasticities for seven food groups are estimated. Results indicate that own‐price elasticities for each group are negative ranging from fairly inelastic to elastic range. Expenditure elasticities indicate that food items are a normal necessity to luxury goods. Additionally, socio‐demographic factors play a significant role in food consumption patterns. Based on our unconditional expenditure elasticities, we also project food demand from rural Indian households for next two decades. Les dépenses alimentaires, qui sont influencées par des facteurs socioéconomiques et démographiques, absorbent une partie considérable du revenu des ménages ruraux typiques en Inde. Dans la présente étude, nous avons utilisé le modèle de demande quasi idéal quadratique pour estimer, à l'aide de données transversales sur les ménages, la demande alimentaire des ménages ruraux en Inde. Nous avons accordé une attention spéciale à la budgétisation en deux étapes des dépenses alimentaires totales et à la demande d'un produit alimentaire particulier du ménage rural. Nous avons estimé les dépenses conditionnelles et inconditionnelles et l’élasticité‐prix de sept groupes alimentaires. Les résultats de notre étude indiquent que l’élasticité‐prix de chaque groupe est négative et qu'elle varie de plutôt inélastique à divers degrés d’élasticité. L’élasticité des dépenses indique que les produits alimentaires varient de nécessités de base à produits de luxe. Les facteurs sociodémographiques jouent également un rôle important dans les habitudes de consommation alimentaire. D'après les élasticités des dépenses établies dans notre étude, nous avons estimé la demande alimentaire des ménages ruraux en Inde pour les deux prochaines décennies.     

Demand Curves for Stocks Do Slope Down: New Evidence from an Index Weights Adjustment

Weights in the Toronto Stock Exchange 300 index are determined by the market values of the included stocks' public floats. In November 1996, the exchange implemented a previously announced revision of its definition of the public float. This revision, which increased the floats and the index weights of 31 stocks, conveyed no information and had no effect on the legal duties of shareholders. Affected stocks experienced statistically significant excess returns of 2.3 percent during the event week, and no price reversal occurred as trading volume returned to normal levels. These findings support downward sloping demand curves for stocks.     

Supply network capacity planning for semiconductor manufacturing with uncertain demand and correlation in demand considerations

A semiconductor supply network involves many expensive steps, which have to be executed to serve global markets. The complexity of global capacity planning combined with the large capital expenditures to increase factory capacity makes it important to incorporate optimization methodologies for cost reduction and long-term planning. The typical view of a semiconductor supply network consists of layers for wafer fab, sort, assembly, test and demand centers. We present a two-stage stochastic integer-programming formulation to model a semiconductor supply network. The model makes strategic capacity decisions, (i.e., build factories or outsource) while accounting for the uncertainties in demand for multiple products. We use the model not only to analyze how variability in demand affects the make/buy decisions but also to investigate how the correlation between demands of different products affects these strategic decisions. Finally, we demonstrate the value of incorporating demand uncertainty into a decision-making scheme.     

管理方法的正确结合——精益与六西格玛的适当结合可使组织获得成功

六西格玛提供了一种基于目标的流程改进框架.爱德华·戴明(W.Edwards Deming)曾说过:"我们相信上帝,但其他人都要用数据说话."这句话已经成为众多六西格玛实践者的座右铭. 相比之下,精益的流程改进框架则是建立在"减少流程浪费"以及"保持流程中的持续流"等核心原则之上.     

Military coups and the consequences of durable de facto power: the case of Pakistan

We analyze the role of the military as an independent interest group within the State, based on the two-player theoretical framework of Acemoglu and Robinson (Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006); we innovate by introducing the military as a third player, a specialist in violence. In particular, we study the conditions under which a democratic regime can prevent a transition to an authoritarian regime via a military coup, when a coup requires the support of both the military and the elite sections of the civilian population. We carry out an historical case study of Pakistan to motivate and illustrate our argument, and show that Pakistan’s three coups since independence are associated with parameter shifts in our model.     

A structural compendium on service quality and customer satisfaction: A survey of banks in India

ABSTRACT

The core aim of the research is to measure and analyze the quality of services offered by the top three public- and private-sector banks in India and to attempt to know how bank services quality affects customer satisfaction. By administering both questionnaires and personal interviews, researchers garnered the opinions of a total of 600 respondents with BANKQUAL statement. The authors applied Cronbach’s alpha to test reliability and the selected hypotheses have been proven with Chi-square tests and t-tests. All the public-sector banks chosen for the study lead in the satisfaction index over the private-sector banks by demonstrating differences in the dimensions of credibility, influence, and geographic spread. The research is most precious to diverse stakeholders of the Indian banking industry, particularly to banks who want to know about their existing service quality for further improvement. For the first time, the researchers introduced the comprehensive BANKQUAL statement to test out the quality of bank services in India.     

When sunspots don't matter

Summary We show that a finite, competitive economy isimmune to sunspots if (i) preferences are strictly convex, (ii) the set of feasible allocations is convex, and (iii) the contingent-claims market is perfect. The conditions (i)–(ii) cover some, but not all, economies with nonconvex technologies. Based on an indivisible-good example, we show that even economies with strictly convex preferences and full insurance arenot in general immune from sunspots. We also show that (1) the sufficient conditions (i)–(iii) are not necessary for sunspot immunity and (2)ex-ante efficiency is not necessary for immunity from sunspots.This paper is based on an earlier paper, Indivisibilities in Production, and Sunspot Equilibrium, presented at the 1990 S.E.D.C. Meetings, Minneapolis-St. Paul, June 1990. The research support of NSF Grant SES-9012780, the Center for Analytic Economics, and the Thorne Fund is gratefully acknowledged.     

Impediments to Adoption of Green Products: An ISM Analysis

During the last decades of the twentieth century, industry and business leaders have recognized the importance of incorporating environmental sustainability in their business practices. This has resulted in emergence of new concepts such as green marketing and green consumerism. Over the years, various studies have explored the concept of green consumer behavior and have listed out factors that work as either barriers or enablers to consumer adoption of environmentally sustainable products. The present study identifies such barriers from the available body of literature and tries to construct a model using ISM (Interpretive Structural Modeling) to show how these different barriers interact and affect the consumer decision making regarding green products.