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The purpose of this paper is to explain some phenomena observed in the acquisition of motor skills: the loss of conscious access to knowledge of the structure of a skill and the awareness that an error has been made prior to the receipt of knowledge of results. Although there are rich descriptive accounts of skill acquisition in the literature, there are no satisfactory explanatory models of the cognitive processes involved. The paper provides such a model.

In the 1970s, the first author implemented a computer program model of the cognitive processes involved in learning and skill acquisition, based on a series of empirical investigations. Recently, with assistance from the second author, the model has been reviewed, updated and re-implemented. The paper sets this work in the broader context of a theory of learning and teaching, conversation theory.

The model provides a constructivist account of skill acquisition and associated phenomena. The model provides theoretical foundations for conversation theory.

The model adds to the understanding of motor skill acquisition and to the understanding of processes of learning and teaching in general.

The model and its interpretation are an original contribution to the skills acquisition literature.

The purpose of this paper is to study a nascent theory and an emerging concept of solving a fully fuzzy linear system (FFLS) with no non negative restrictions on the triangular fuzzy numbers chosen as parameters. Two new simplified computational methods are proposed to solve a FFLS without any sign restrictions. The first method eliminates the non‐negativity constraint from the coefficient matrix while the second method eliminates the constraint of non‐negativity on the solution vector. The methods are introduced with an objective to broaden the domain of fuzzy linear systems to encompass a wide range of problems occurring in reality.

The design of numerical methods is motivated by decomposing the fuzzy based linear system into its equivalent crisp linear form which can be further solved by variety of classical methods to solve a crisp linear system. Further the paper investigates Schur complement technique to solve the crisp equivalent of the FFLS.

The results that are obtained reveal interesting properties of a FFLS. By using the proposed methods, the authors are able to check the consistency of the fuzzy linear system as well as obtain the nature of obtained solutions, i.e. trivial, unique or infinite. Further it is also seen that an n×n FFLS may yield finitely many solutions which may not be entirely feasible (strong). Also the methods successfully remove the non‐negativity restriction on the coefficient matrix and the solution vector, respectively.

Evolving methods with better computational complexity and that which remove the non‐negativity restriction jointly on all the parameters are left as an open problem.

The proposed methods are new and conceptually simple to understand and apply in several scientific areas where fuzziness persists. The methods successfully remove several constraints that have been employed exhaustively by researchers and thus eventually tend to widen the breadth of applicability and usability of fuzzy linear models in real life situations. Heretofore, the usability of FFLS is largely dormant.

The purpose of the present paper is to provide a systematic overview of dimensions that need to be enfolded or considered in microfinance policies and strategies designs as well as impact studies aiming to empower or assess the empowerment of a specific category of women, namely women entrepreneurs. Afterward, the study aims to suggest some directions for future studies.

To meet its purpose, the paper applies the systematic review approach. The applied methodology follows guidelines for systematic reviews of social and economic interventions as set out by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA). More specifically, the authors examine 87 empirical papers from 6 databases investigating the impact of microfinance institutions on the empowerment of women entrepreneurs.

Overall, findings of the study suggest that dimensions of the empowerment of women entrepreneurs are formed and conditioned by normative, cognitive and regulative institutional logics. Additionally, the systematic review suggests key research avenues and calls for more inclusive empirical studies in terms of geographical coverage, microfinance services/products assessed and method designs applied.

Findings of the current review provide clear theoretical contribution and useful practical implications in the field of microfinance and the empowerment of women entrepreneurs. On the one hand, the study suggests to scholars key avenues for future studies likely to bring new insights in terms of theory, context and methods. On the other hand, this study extents the understanding of microfinance practitioners on the concept of women empowerment as the field of female entrepreneurship is concerned. This implication is likely to enable the design of appropriate microfinance strategies and policies, allowing women entrepreneurs to achieve an overall empowerment.

The present paper contributes to the debate around the multidimensionality of the concept, “women empowerment.” The multidimensional nature of the addressed concept is well established in the existing literature. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has provided a conceptual analysis of empowerment dimensions of a particular category of women, namely women entrepreneurs. Unlike most of the studies assuming that all women face identical challenges, the present paper brings new insights on the topic as it is built on a different assumption. The paper takes ground from the institutional theory and applies it to the specific case of female entrepreneurship.

Emami is facing the heat from activist-consumers as well as its competitors. Competitors have renamed their cosmetic products by dropping the controversial word ‘fair.’ This was in response to the Black Lives Movement that erupted in the United States in May 2020. However, the movement against fairness is somewhat muted in India and is mostly occurring amongst urban, highly educated, younger cohort who are unlikely to be the users of the product anyway. The significant consumer base yearns for fairness and is willing to spend money on products which help them achieve the same. In such a scenario, how should Emami respond to competitor actions and consumer-activist pressure?

The case provides an opportunity to discuss the significance of the brand name, role of advertising and gender stereotypes.

This case highlights the challenges faced by a young and inexperienced Area Sales Manager (ASM), early in her career. This is an often-encountered situation by fresh graduates. Through the analysis of the case, the students will be able to: ■ understand challenges a young manager faces in taking over a new, unfamiliar and underperforming territory; ■ analyze and learn to manage data and identify performance gaps in the territory, by selecting the right metrics; ■ learn the factors for evaluating the performance of current intermediaries (distributors); and ■ appreciate the importance of managing all stakeholders – internal team and building a strong relationship with the intermediaries – both distributors and retailers.

Kavita Kaur, the new Area Sales Manager at Broadway India Pvt. Ltd. (BIPL), had just taken over the Chhattisgarh sales territory in January 2020. Fresh out of a B-school, it was her first job, and her allotted territory was severely lagging growth at only 1%, compared to an all-India country growth at 13% in 2019, over the previous year. The territory was operated by established intermediaries (distributors) with long associations with BIPL. Based on her data analyses of distributors’ performance, Kaur started her retail visit with the highest selling distributor’s area (Sharda Agencies) to confirm her understanding of what the data had shown her. Following her retail visit and a meeting with Sharda Agencies, the situation turned for the worse. An email bordering to a threat from him took her aback. Kaur now had to make a choice to ensure growth in her new territory. Her options were between placating the current distributor or appointing a new one – should she retain or replace? Both had their own risks.

This case is intended for use at the postgraduate level in courses such as sales management, channel management and strategic marketing courses, as well as in executive management programs. The case is relevant from the context of channel management in India, where channel intermediaries can be very demanding. The case will give students a practical hands-on decision-making situation, where there are complexities of quantitative and qualitative nature. It will also help young graduates prepare for real life situations where the assigned territory is struggling in performance and a lot is expected from the new recruits.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

After half a decade of balance sheet clean-up prompted by the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) asset quality review (AQR), Indian banks are back on track for increased loan growth. Being a financial vehicle for the economy, loan growth cannot be put on hold for a long period of time. But it is also important to understand that loan growth carries an inherent risk of default. A trade-off exists between loan growth, non-performing loans (NPLs) and bank profitability. Our study highlights the importance of understanding this relationship.

For our study, we have taken a sample of India’s private and public sector banks. The dataset consists of the financials of our sample for the period 2006–2021. Two-step differenced generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM) estimation has been used to establish the relationship. The mediating role of NPLs in the relationship between loan growth and profitability is examined by the mediation analysis using structural equation modeling (SEM) and the Sobel test. We have used Stata 16.1 for the analysis of our dataset.

The findings of our study suggest that bank lending is a major contributor to the bank’s earnings. Loan growth after a certain point has a negative impact on profitability, and it also adds to the NPLs of the bank. The study result indicates that moderate loan growth is key to steady and stable growth in the Indian banking industry.

Our study is directed toward understanding the positive and negative manifestations of loan growth. We develop a framework to understand this relationship and then empirically prove it. The study is beneficial for employees and policymakers alike to minimize the negative impact of loan growth.

The issue of the simultaneous impact of loan growth on NPLs and profitability has not been studied in the Indian banking sector. Also, this study adds to the present literature by studying the mediation effect of the NPLs on the loan growth and profitability relationship.

The study aims to cope with the problems confronted in the skin lesion datasets with less training data toward the classification of melanoma. The vital, challenging issue is the insufficiency of training data that occurred while classifying the lesions as melanoma and non-melanoma.

In this work, a transfer learning (TL) framework Transfer Constituent Support Vector Machine (TrCSVM) is designed for melanoma classification based on feature-based domain adaptation (FBDA) leveraging the support vector machine (SVM) and Transfer AdaBoost (TrAdaBoost). The working of the framework is twofold: at first, SVM is utilized for domain adaptation for learning much transferrable representation between source and target domain. In the first phase, for homogeneous domain adaptation, it augments features by transforming the data from source and target (different but related) domains in a shared-subspace. In the second phase, for heterogeneous domain adaptation, it leverages knowledge by augmenting features from source to target (different and not related) domains to a shared-subspace. Second, TrAdaBoost is utilized to adjust the weights of wrongly classified data in the newly generated source and target datasets.

The experimental results empirically prove the superiority of TrCSVM than the state-of-the-art TL methods on less-sized datasets with an accuracy of 98.82%.

Experiments are conducted on six skin lesion datasets and performance is compared based on accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity. The effectiveness of TrCSVM is evaluated on ten other datasets towards testing its generalizing behavior. Its performance is also compared with two existing TL frameworks (TrResampling, TrAdaBoost) for the classification of melanoma.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the disclosure pattern of corporate sustainability (CS) and the influence of sustainability reporting on firm performance of four countries in Asia – Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India.

The authors have collected the sustainability reports and annual reports of 111 firms from four Asian countries for a period of six years. Based on the framework of Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI, 3 and 3.1), content analysis is used for calculating the disclosure score of corporate sustainability performance (CSP). These scores are further used to examine the impact on firm performance by employing a panel data regression model.

The study finds that the average level and quality of disclosure are the highest for Japanese firms, followed by India and South Korea. However, in the case of Indonesia, the average score is very low. Further, the study finds a significant difference in the disclosure of overall sustainability as well as components of sustainability between the countries. The regression results indicate the positive impact of CSP (both in terms of level and quality) on MBR. Specifically, the outcome of the regression model reveals that both the level and quality disclosure of CS are crucial for enhancing firm value for both the developed and developing countries of Asia. Moreover, the relative influence of CSP (both in terms of level and quality) on firm performance is found to be more in developed countries than the developing countries of Asia.

This is the first comprehensive study in the Asian context to investigate the disclosure pattern of CSP and also examine the association between CSP and firm performance by employing the panel data model. The outcome of this study is useful for policy implication.

Consumer behavior, in the context of general insurance, is worth exploring to formulate growth strategies for insurance sector in India in light of the proposed structural changes. Indian consumers attract global players due to untapped potential and favorable policy measures initiated for higher foreign direct investments. The purpose of this paper is to understand the prevailing level of service quality as perceived by insurance customers in India in the presence of certain contextual antecedents and moderators.

Perceptions about constructs like customer risk dispositions, awareness, past experiences, customer involvement, choice overload, service quality and satisfaction of 256 customers were collected using a questionnaire survey. A variance-based structural equation modeling helped to identify significant linkages among the constructs.

In order to assess service quality levels, a 15-item scale having the infrastructure, employees, agents and product dimensions was found valid and reliable. Choice overload and customer involvement were found to moderate the influence of antecedents and service quality, respectively. The influence of choice overload on quality perceptions is insignificant. The study concludes that the existing risk beliefs are insufficient, and experiences have less predictive contribution to quality perceptions.

Theoretically, this study examined the process of satisfaction development from service quality perceptions. This study offers insights for developing theories to portray future consumer behavior where more dependence of self-service technologies is expected to dominate service delivery mechanisms in insurance. The study informs that general insurance customers in India prefer more diversified products, more customer-centric employees/agents and better technical quality.

The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of the prevailing insurance consumer behavior in the general insurance sector of India and help insurance service providers in streamlining their strategies for better insurance penetration and reduced lapse rate.

This study helps in understanding the emerging trends in general insurance buying behavior in India.