Adoption of Ubiquitous Customer Relationship Management (uCRM) in Enterprise: Leadership Support and Technological Competence as Moderators

Abstract

Ubiquitous Customer Relationship Management (uCRM) signifies the realization of special characteristics, including proactiveness, context awareness, and mobility. This uCRM helps to enhance promptness and timeliness of the traditional system, thereby creating an environment associated with a state of being everywhere in no time and covering any device and any network. uCRM provides high personalization of service. The uCRM system has opened a new area of satisfaction for customers. Context awareness computing, a uCRM characteristic, is presumed to have enhanced benefits for a firm adopting uCRM in India. In this context, this study has taken a holistic attempt to analyze how technological competence and leadership support can enhance the business performance of a firm adopting uCRM. With input from literature studies, a hypothesis and a conceptual model have been formulated. Statistically, those have been validated with survey work considering 165 usable respondents from 22 different firms situated in three metropolitan cities in India. Results show that the effect of technological competence and leadership support positively help a uCRM-dependent firm towards achieving better business benefits. The study ends with a comprehensive conclusion.     

Is public investment complementary to private investment in Indian agriculture? Evidence from NARDL approach

The issue of complementarity between public farm investment and private farm investment in Indian agriculture is an unsettled empirical question in the literature, which has not been studied adequately. Few studies analyzing the trends of both types of investments have produced contradictory results. Thus, this study attempts to bridge that gap, by examining the hypothesis of crowding‐in/crowding‐out effect of public sector investment on private investment. Time series data for a period of 45 years from 1971 to 2015 has been used. Adopting a ‘nonlinear auto‐regressive distributive lag’ (NARDL) model the study confirms a strong crowding‐in effect of public investment on private investment in short run, but relatively a weak complementarity between the two over long‐run. Moreover, the public canal intensity as a major component of public investment has been observed to have much stronger effect on private investment than the public investment itself. It is also found that private investment is constrained by its own lagged values, institutional credit and terms of trade during both short‐run and long‐run. The policy suggestion of this study calls for an immediate arrest of declining trend of public investment.     

Inspiring employees' ecological behaviors: The roles of corporate environmental strategy,biospheric values,and eco-centric leadership

The consequences of environmental degradation have steered organizations to promote pro-ecological behaviors among their employees, and achieving this effectively is paramount for business and environmental sustainability. Applying a multilevel integrated approach, this study investigates the impact of corporate environmental strategy, biospheric values, and eco-centric leadership on employees' ecological behaviors. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 289 employees from a cross section of industries in Bangladesh. The findings reveal the significant influences of environmental strategy and biospheric values on employees' ecological behaviors as well as the moderating role of eco-centric leadership. The study also provides some significant insights for formulating environmental strategy and inspiring employees' ecological behaviors in organizational contexts. Theoretical and managerial implications as well as future research directions have also been provided.     

Are short‐term effects of pollution important for growth and optimal fiscal policy?

We study optimal fiscal policy in a stock‐flow model of the environment within an endogenous growth framework, where some pollutants have a lasting impact on environmental quality which is restored through abatement expenditure, while others dissipate and hence, have a short‐term effect on the environment. All pollutants, however, affect the productivity of a public good negatively. Given that short‐term pollution, although it dissipates, is irreversible in this sense, a government cannot ignore its negative effects since this type of pollution lowers the productivity of all inputs. We find that a larger negative effect of short‐term pollutants as well as a higher congestion effect of private capital leads to corrective fiscal policies with higher optimal income tax and abatement expenditure rates, which have favorable growth consequences. Interestingly, we find that the rate of short‐term pollution does not affect optimal fiscal policy while that of the long‐term pollution does.     

I (do not) consume; therefore,I am: Investigating materialism and voluntary simplicity through a moderated mediation model

With the burgeoning of consumer culture and materialism on a global scale, a counter-culture movement, namely, voluntary simplicity, is slowly gaining currency. Extant research reveals a degree of disparateness in the relationship between materialism and voluntary simplicity. Drawing on the value-basis theory and anti-consumption research, the current study attempts at an unorthodox study of the fledgling culture of anti-consumption in urban India. The paper empirically examines the relationship between materialism and voluntary simplicity in India. This research, through an experimental study followed by a sample survey, conducted among urban Indian consumers, examines how satisfaction with life, self-efficacy, and individualism interact with materialistic values to eventually influence voluntary simplicity attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 74 working professionals), we experimentally triggered materialistic aspirations and evaluated their effects on voluntary simplicity in comparison to a control condition. In Study 2 (N = 315), individuals self-rated their materialistic values, satisfaction with life, self-efficacy, cultural orientation, and voluntary simplicity attitude. Our study, contrary to the suggestions in the existing literature, demonstrates that materialists espouse voluntary simplicity attitudes when environmental degradation around them directly impacts their health, wealth, and well-being. In addition to the positive direct effect, satisfaction with life and self-efficacy serially mediate the relationship between materialism and voluntary simplicity, providing a welcome divergence from dark-sided conceptualizations of materialism. Our results help global marketers, and public policymakers better understand the interaction between materialistic values and sustainable consumption attitudes, in the developing country perspective.     

Unionized Labour Market,Unemployment Allowances,Productive Public Expenditure And Endogenous Growth

An endogenous growth model with unionised labour market is developed to analyse the interaction between the tax financed productive public expenditure policy and the unemployment benefit policy. We consider both ‘Efficient Bargaining’ model and ‘Right to Manage’ model; and analyse properties of balanced growth rate maximising income tax policy as well as effects of unionisation. This growth rate maximising income tax rate exceeds the competitive output share of the public input in the presence of an unemployment benefit scheme. The growth effect of unionisation in the ‘Efficient Bargaining’ model and in the ‘Right to Manage’ model are different.     

Economic Reforms and Gender-Based Wage Inequality in the Presence of Factor Market Distortions

A simple three-sector general equilibrium model has been developed with both male and female labour and factor market distortions. The effects of different liberalized economic policies have been examined on the gender-based wage inequality. The analysis finds that credit market reform and tariff reform produce favourable effects on the wage inequality while the liberalized investment policy becomes counterproductive. The basic model has been extended to treat domestic capital differently from foreign capital. In the extended model, all of the above results hold. Additionally, it has been found that domestic capital formation is likely to produce a favourable impact on the gender wage inequality. These results have important policy implications for a small open developing economy.

     

The impact of credit constraints on exporting firms: Evidence from the provision and subsequent removal of subsidised credit

We study the causal impact of credit constraints on exporters using a natural experiment provided by two policy changes in India, first in 1998 which made small‐scale firms eligible for subsidised direct credit, and a subsequent reversal in policy in 2000 wherein some of these firms lost their eligibility. Using firms that were not affected by these policy changes as our control group in each case, we find that credit expansion increased the growth rate of bank borrowing and had a positive effect on exports. The subsequent policy reversal in 2000 had no impact on the growth rate of bank borrowing or on exports.     

A new method of projection-based inference in GMM with weakly identified nuisance parameters

Projection-based tests for subsets of parameters are useful because they do not over-reject the true parameter values when either it is difficult to estimate the nuisance parameters or their identification status is questionable. However, they are also often criticized for being overly conservative. We overcome this conservativeness by introducing a new projection-based test that is more powerful than the traditional projection-based tests. The new test is even asymptotically equivalent to the related plug-in-based tests when all the parameters are identified. Extension to models with weakly identified parameters shows that the new test is not dominated by the related plug-in-based tests.