Traffic law enforcement in Hyderabad, India

The aim of the study was to understand traffic law enforcement (TLE) carried out by the police to reduce non-compliance with traffic laws on the roads of Hyderabad city in India for 2001-2003. The Traffic Police database of citations issued to drivers who violated traffic laws in Hyderabad was analysed for the years 2001-2003 to describe the TLE activities of the police, to describe and compare the TLE activities for the different types of vehicles and to compare the TLE activities for the 3 years. The violations were classified in five categories - those related to driving, parking, vehicle, document and others; and TLE into safety and other TLE. A total of 646 161 traffic-law violations were registered in 2001, 904 447 in 2002 and 964 275 in 2003 for Hyderabad. Driving and parking violations were the most common violations registered in all 3 years, with parking violations slightly higher in 2001 (43.5%) and driving violations slightly higher in 2002 (35%) and 2003 (36.4%). Auto-rickshaws (three-wheel commercial passenger vehicles) accounted for the highest violations registered in 2001 (41.4%) whereas motorized two-wheelers had the highest registered violations in 2002 (35.5%) and 2003 (33.2%). Safety TLE activity (detecting and registering driving violations) was only one-third of all the TLE activity performed by the police in the 3 years, and disobeying traffic signals was the most common violation registered under safety TLE. Indian rupees 50 (US$1.1) were collected by way of a fine in 87% of the cases registered. Age and gender of the violators were not recorded in the database. These data can be used for planning, monitoring and evaluating TLE in Hyderabad. These can help identify traffic control and human factors that could lead to traffic noncompliance, and help identify priorities for improving road safety. These data indicate a need to enhance the safety TLE activity of the police, to make TLE more visible in Hyderabad, and to assess the effectiveness of the current legal action as deterrence to improve road safety. Recommendations to enhance TLE within the given resources of the police are made. More effort is needed towards systematic collection and analysis of data on TLE in India to facilitate long-term improvements in TLE for safer roads.     

Employee communication strategies for organizational crises

Perhaps at no time is it more important for an organization to communicate sensitively and openly with its employees than during a crisis. Such efforts, however, are driven by management's view of a crisis situation, which frequently fails to consider employees' stress-induced responses to management communication behavior. This paper draws on research findings on life situations, crisis management, communication, stress, psychology, and information processing, to analyze employees' emotional, cognitive, and information needs when confronted by organizational crises. The authors present a receiver-oriented Employee Crisis Communication Model. This model outlines employees' stress-invoked perceptual and behavioral responses to major crises, which may, among other things, seriously impair their ability to handle information and make decisions. The authors then discuss the implications of applying certain communication strategies to crisis environments.     

Demand competition and investment heterogeneity in industries based on systemic technologies: evidence from the US long-distance telecommunications services industry, 1984–1996

Industries based on systemic technologies are often characterized by a dynamically evolving market structure. The market structure that provides the context for firms’ investment choices itself evolves due to the feedback effect of firms’ investments. In such cases, analyses of investment-performance relationship, purporting to explain sustainable competitive advantages, should ideally account for the endogeneity of the determinants of market structure—technology, demand, and policy—and firms’ investment choices. This paper focuses on the endogeneity of the demand-side determinants of market structure and firms’ demand-side investments under the assumed conditions of constant technology and policy environment. In doing so it contradicts the extant depiction of the evolution of industrial market structure in the above context as primarily caused by the evolution of underlying technological system in response to firms’ endogenous technological investments that generate sustainable competitive advantage for the dominant firms. A dynamic evolutionary model of demand competition captures the competition in the downstream market for basic industry product and its complements in an industry based on systemic technology during its post-interoperability stage. A natural experiment drawn from the US Long-distance telecommunications services industry during 1984–1996 allows testing the hypotheses drawn from the above model in a panel data setting.     

Corporate advantage in customer-centric diversification

Our theory explains how multi-product corporations that engage in customer-centric diversification can create and sustain corporate advantage. First, we invoke the concept of customer-centric assets to explain their role as the cornerstone of corporate advantage in customer-centric diversification. Second, our explanation of the corporate advantage in customer-centric diversification goes beyond the hypothetical ‘consumer synergies’ argument to also include the ‘market-power advantage’ argument. We explain the mechanisms employed by multi-product firms to share and/or leverage their customer-centric assets to create corporate advantage. Third, we explain how sustaining the corporate advantage so achieved requires the organizational-renewal activities to go beyond simply addressing the changing nature of the firm’s demand-side resource (i.e. customer-base) to manage revenue and/or profits.     

Systems of technological innovation: a review of research activities taking the case of nanotechnology and India

Systems of innovation can play an important role in linking technological innovation to manufacturing and industrial competitiveness. This paper aims to understand the systems and actors from a perspective of cooperative strategies, taking the case of a key emerging industry – nanotechnology. Longitudinal trends in R&D output worldwide and in select large countries were analysed based on bibliometrics. S-curves were adapted to detect the transitions for select countries. Tech mining was used to identify patterns of cooperation among countries. Academic research emerged to be the strength of Asia and India, but major challenges remain on several other elements of the system of innovation.     

Product Attributes as Purchase Determinants of Imported Fruits in Indian Consumers

This study aims to investigate the consumer perceptions and purchase determinants of imported fruits in an emerging economy such as India. A consumer survey was conducted in one of the major urban cities of India. Item measures were related to consumer perceptions, purchase determinants, and consumer-reported willingness to pay price premiums. The data analysis was undertaken using techniques like exploratory factor analysis, logistic regression, and analysis of variance. Consumers associate imported fruits with health, safety, taste, and free from chemicals, whereas extrinsic factors such as storage conditions, store image, appearance, label, country of origin, and price also influence the willingness to purchase imported fruits. The demographic factors having the most impact on consumers’ attribute ratings for imported fruits are age, gender, income, and education. This study highlights the significant purchase determinants that can help marketers of imported fruits to gain higher share in Indian markets.     

The performance implications of demand-side diversification: evidence from the US telecommunications sector, 1990–1996

This article contributes to the emerging demand-side perspective in strategy by explaining the demand-side sources of the systematic performance differences (a) between firms that diversify to offer complementary products and those who choose not to diversify, and (b) across and within diversifying firms over time. The US Telecommunications Services sector during 1990–1996 provides a dynamic research setting to test our hypotheses concerning the value-generating effect of shared demand-side strategic assets across the diversifying firms' home- and target-market. We find that the overall quality of demand-side strategic assets of local telephone companies who chose to diversify to offer complementary long-distance services (to their local telephony customers) is higher than those who chose not to diversify. We also find that the variation in market-shares of the diversified local telephone companies in their respective target market(s) for complementary long-distance services is positively influenced by the quality of demand-side strategic assets deployed in the target markets.     

An exploratory procedure for identifying influential subgroups in linear regression

In some linear regression problems samples may be unwittingly drawn from a population that is heterogeneous in respect to intercept. For such problems, an exploratory method is developed to identify influential subgroups of a heterogeneous population. Discriminant analysis is used to characterize, interpret and validate subgroups. Four criteria are proposed to select a set of influential subgroups, which are then used in estimating a linear regression model. The method is illustrated through analysis of real data on political violence.