Search results

Financial institutions that are marketing tax‐sheltered plans claim that the implied rates of return of tax‐sheltered strategies are superior to those rates of return realized from taxable plans. The purpose of our paper is to investigate that claim. To accomplish our purpose, we have developed a model to determine, under different assumptions of various tax rates, the incremental benefits and the implied rates of returns of tax‐deferred investments over the taxable investments. When the model is applied, the results show that tax‐deferred investments are not always superior. Consequently, investors may not have a choice but to select portfolios at the lower end of the efficient frontier.

The main purpose behind this work is to explore the methods already proposed in various literatures to overcome the issues associated with VAr management in a competitive environment. Managing reactive power support service in competitive electricity market environment has become an important constituent of ancillary services. The characteristics of VAr generation/absorption do not allow its transmission over a long distance. The issues associated with the localized nature of reactive power must be considered during the valuation, planning, pricing and allocation of VAr producing/absorbing resources. In this review work, the key issues associated with the reactive support and the techniques used to tackle these issues in various utilities across the globe are been discussed in brief. In the literature, numerous renowned authors propose various methods to manage reactive power with various types of structural and operational scenarios. These methods are also discussed briefly in this paper. The experience with VAr management in some matured electricity market is also discussed in this paper.

Discussion of various issues associated with reactive power management and methods/techniques to overcome these, has been carried out in this paper. The methods were proposed in various literatures related to reactive power management by some of the renowned authors and adopted by various electric utilities.

The review work may be useful for utilities to develop a quick insight on reactive support services to control the voltage profile and also, it may be a useful asset for the researchers working in this area.

The paper is organized with different sections to elaborate the issues and associated methods. This paper is a single piece of work, which addresses reactive power planning, pricing for VAr support, market issues and valuation of VAr utilization.

The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, to identify and encapsulate the enablers that can facilitate technology integration in higher education and second, to understand and analyze the interplay between technology agility enablers.

The study used the Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) approach to construct a theoretical model of the technology agility enablers in higher education and MICMAC analysis for ranking and segregating the enablers based on their dependence power into four categories: Autonomous, Dependent, Linkage and Independent.

The study helped identify eight technology agility enablers, with the Covid-19 pandemic as the most significant enabler. The Covid-19 pandemic has catalyzed the diffusion of technology across the education sector in India, including tertiary higher education. The study revealed government initiatives and institutional commitment as other enablers that can promote technology agility in higher education.

The results of this study would assist the policymakers and management of universities and colleges in understanding the important enablers that can facilitate technology integration in higher education.

Research in the past on technology adoption in higher education has looked into each enabler in isolation. This research provides a comprehensive view of the enablers and has attempted to establish a multidirectional interplay between the enablers.

The purpose of this paper is to “identify”, “analyze” and “construct” a framework to quantify the relationships between several determinants of organizational preparedness for change in the start-ups during the COVID-19 emergencies.

Total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) is used to find characteristics that assist in analyzing the readiness or preparedness level before initiating a change deployment process in start-ups. A cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis is performed to determine the driving and dependent elements of change in start-ups.

From literature research and an expert interview, this study selected ten variables of change preparedness to explore inner interconnections and comprehend the inner connections factors. The findings depict that clarity of mission and goals, reward system, technological advancement and motivational readiness have been considered the most important readiness factor for deploying organizational change in start-ups during the COVID-19 emergencies.

This research will aid the management and researchers gain a better understanding of the factors that influence change preparedness. Constant observation of current changes in the start-ups and the external environment will aid in improving the quality of products or services provided by the start-ups during the COVID-19. The start-ups can use these criteria linked to change readiness. The priority of each element is determined using MICMAC analysis and ranking using the TISM technique, which assists start-ups in ordering the enablers from highest to lowest priority.

There is no research regarding factors influencing organizational readiness for change in start-ups during the COVID-19 emergencies. This research gap is filled by analyzing aspects linked to organizational readiness for change in start-ups. This gap inspired the present study, which uses the “Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM)” technique to uncover change determinants and investigate hierarchical interconnections among factors influencing organizational readiness to change in start-ups during the COVID-19 emergencies.

This study aims to further the understanding of employees’ engagement by explaining their organizational commitment through their perception of the availability of work-life benefits in the organization. This study also investigates the mediating role of job satisfaction in this context.

The model was tested on the primary data collected in two phases from 270 teaching professionals in higher education institutes in Northern India. Barren and Kenny’s algorithm and hierarchical regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that employees’ perception of work-life benefits strongly influences their organizational commitment. Also, the results support that employees’ job satisfaction mediates the above-mentioned relationship.

Self-reported data could be considered as a key limitation of this study and for more accurate results supervisors’ (line managers) perspective could also be included in future studies. Also, in addition to perceived work-life benefits, supervisors’ support could also have an impact on employees’ commitment, thus its inclusion in the model could draw a clearer picture.

This research has two key contributions: first, it adds to the limited literature examining the employees’ engagement issues in the academic sector. Second, this research is one of, if not the first, to investigate perceived work-life benefits among third-level teaching staff in India to explain employees’ commitment to their organizations.

The purpose of this study is to present a systematic methodological review of the application of field experiments in the domain of marketing research. By performing this study, the authors seek to offer necessary advice and suggestions to marketing scholars interested in the application of field experiments and to promote the adoption of field experiments as a preferred methodological choice among scholars in this domain.

A total of 315 field experiments published in the ten leading marketing journals in the past five decades were analyzed in this systematic methodological review. This study examines various aspects of field experiments, including the research profile of existing research, different trends and topics related to field experiments, choice of research questions, methods of observations, unobtrusive data collection, types of interventions and outcome variables.

This study identified various trends and topics, categories of manipulations, types of limitations and important considerations in designing field experiments and offered necessary advice on the future of field experiments in marketing research.

This study provides a complete roadmap for future marketing scholars to adopt field studies in their research plans. The systematic summary of limitations and the checklist will be helpful for the researchers to design and execute field studies more effectively and efficiently.

This review study offers a complete roadmap for marketing scholars who are interested in adopting field experiments in their research projects. The discussion of trends and topics, manipulations, limitations, design considerations and checklist items for field experiments offers relevant insights to marketing scholars and may help them design and execute field experiments more effectively and efficiently.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive methodological review of field experiments published in leading marketing journals throughout the past five decades. This study makes novel and unique contributions to both theory and literature on field experiments in the marketing discipline.

The COVID-19 outbreak disrupted the business environment and severely affected the morale and performance of the employees. Further, the Indian automobile industry witnessed major setbacks and drastically impacted sector in COVID-19. Talent agility is an emerging concept in the field of HRM that will foster innovations and productivity in the automobile industry. Thus, this study aims to explore the barriers to building in-house agile talents in the Indian automobile industry in the new normal.

The barriers of talent agility were identified through a literature review and validated through experts’ opinions. This study used a hybrid approach, which combines Interpretive Structural Modelling-Polarity (ISM-P) and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) to develop a hierarchical structural model of the barriers, followed by classification into cause and effect groups.

The result of the multi-method approach identified that shortage of skills and competencies, lack of IT infrastructure, lack of ambidextrous leaders, lack of smart HRM technologies and practices, lack of attractive reward system/career management, poor advanced T&D, poor industry, institute interface and financial constraints are the critical barriers.

It can provide a strategic roadmap for automobile manufacturers to promote talent agility in the current wave of digitalization (Industry 4.0). This study can help the managers to address and overcome the barrier and hurdles in building talent agility.

This study is unique in that it addresses the contemporary issues related to talent agility in the context of the Indian automobile industry in the current rapidly changing environment. This study developed a holistic integrated ISM(P)-DEMATEL hierarchical framework on the barriers of talent agility indicating inner dependency weights, i.e., the strength of interrelationship between the barriers.

The dynamic business environment and intense competition have mandated agility in operations for manufacturing firms. Effective inter-organizational collaboration can make operations more agile. This paper develops an interpretive model to explore the effect of supply chain collaboration (SCC) on supply chain agility (SCA) and, subsequently, on business performance.

A hierarchical model that illustrates the relationship between SCC, SCA and firm performance components is developed using total interpretative structural modeling (TISM). Also, statistical validation of the model has been performed.

The results indicate that the vision and alertness of the firm on the strategic front promote collaboration between supply chain partners. This creates operational agility, helping the firm to absorb fluctuations in demand, thereby enhancing business performance.

The opinion of most respondents was considered to develop the TISM framework over the fuzzy one, which necessitates a significantly more extensive data set. However, multiple discussions with participants can eliminate the prejudice of the majority approach. Also, the paper's development and validation were restricted to Indian manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The model can potentially be evaluated in large organizations to provide further insights.

The study blends the factors of SCC and SCA in a novel way to explain their combined impact on business performance. The TISM model addresses the “why” of theory development in addition to the “what” and “how” of it. Using triangulation in combination with the interpretative tool, this study additionally offers methodological value.

The purpose of this study is to advance the understanding of resource orchestration in inter-firm partnerships that appropriately configure and align strategic cross-firm supply chain resources and capabilities generating synergies to deliver superior performance.

Applying the resource orchestration logic, supported by the relational view of competitive advantage, the study draws from an empirical analysis of survey data from 152 top-level executives of US manufacturing firms to investigate the effect of leveraging and coherently combining cross-firm supply chain resources with capabilities on operational performance.

The study underscores the view that appropriately orchestrated combinations of key partnership resources and capabilities as mechanisms for marketing strategy implementation, enhance performance. Specifically, research results suggest that complementary inter-firm resources and lean align, and similarly idiosyncratic resources and agility align synergistically to deliver superior operational performance outcomes. The results also accent partnership responses to intense competition, enabling enhanced operational performance. The findings thus enrich the understanding of the resource orchestration logic and strategy, making important theoretical contributions.

As is typical in marketing and strategy research, the study research design has a cross-sectional framework, thus limiting insights on the resource orchestration dynamics that can otherwise be generated using a longitudinal design. Also, the resource orchestration stream is still nascent. Further research is needed to delineate the orchestration mechanisms that deliver on performance outcomes, especially in supply chains.

A key insight for supply chain and marketing managers is that close-knit inter-firm partnerships are critical for accessing idiosyncratic and complementary resources that can be configured and symbiotically aligned with market-facing agility and lean capabilities, respectively, to deliver market value. Proactive partnerships, especially in highly competitive and disruptive environments, enable mobilizing cross-firm resources and building appropriate matching combinations with capabilities to deliver on operational performance.

The study, guided by theory, advances the understanding of how key cross-firm resources and capabilities deliver performance gains. The key to competitive advantage and enhanced performance outcomes may lie in acquiring, leveraging and deploying appropriately matched resource-capability combinations. The present study investigates this proposition within the context of supply chain partnerships, focusing on cross-firm resources and capabilities.

Gas metal arc-based directed energy deposition (GMA-DED) process experiences residual stress (RS) developed due to heat accumulation during successive layer deposition as a significant challenge. To address that, monitoring of transient temperature distribution concerning time is a critical input. Finite element analysis (FEA) is considered a decisive engineering tool in quantifying temperature and RS in all manufacturing processes. However, computational time and prediction accuracy has always been a matter of concern for FEA-based prediction of responses in the GMA-DED process. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effect of finite element mesh variations on the developed RS in the GMA-DED process.

The variation in the element shape functions, i.e. linear- and quadratic-interpolation elements, has been used to model a single-track 10-layered thin-walled component in Ansys parametric design language. Two cases have been proposed in this study: Case 1 has been meshed with the linear-interpolation elements and Case 2 has been meshed with the combination of linear- and quadratic-interpolation elements. Furthermore, the modelled responses are authenticated with the experimental results measured through the data acquisition system for temperature and RS.

A good agreement of temperature and RS profile has been observed between predicted and experimental values. Considering similar parameters, Case 1 produced an average error of 4.13%, whereas Case 2 produced an average error of 23.45% in temperature prediction. Besides, comparing the longitudinal stress in the transverse direction for Cases 1 and 2 produced an error of 8.282% and 12.796%, respectively.

To avoid the costly and time-taking experimental approach, the experts have suggested the utilization of numerical methods in the design optimization of engineering problems. The FEA approach, however, is a subtle tool, still, it faces high computational cost and low accuracy based on the choice of selected element technology. This research can serve as a basis for the choice of element technology which can predict better responses in the thermo-mechanical modelling of the GMA-DED process.