Rahul R Marathe

In recent times, signalling quality via queues for generic services has received significant attention. However, the literature till date on primary care services has focussed on the optimal speed-quality trade-off to ensure higher service times and lower waiting times for the patients. Borrowing from the queue management literature on generic services, we aim to understand whether the hypothesis that queue is a signal of physician's quality is reasonable. Based on theoretical arguments, we justify the need to investigate this hypothesis on queue acting as a signal of quality in primary care. Although we conjecture that the queue length on arrival may act as a signal of quality, the waiting experienced after joining the queue is still considered expensive.

Purpose: The growth, diversity and applications of research into dynamic capabilities (DCs) have resulted in the whole literature on DCs becoming a complex and disconnected body of knowledge. This has led to criticisms of the subject of DCs as being vague, tautological and without practical value. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize the diverse scholarly literature about DCs and develop a more integrated understanding to minimize the reported apparent vagueness. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors review various relevant themes on DCs using a selection of 133 articles published in 22 recognized, top-tier management journals during the period between 1990 and 2016, with an aim to build a structured and integrated theory. For this, morphological analysis (MA), a systems-thinking technique, is applied. Findings: MA is applied to develop a multi-dimensional conceptual framework comprising five dimensions and 26 variants that enable a structured representation of the conceptual foundations of DCs. Further, the authors identify 81 individual DCs noted by various scholars; elucidate assumptions and antecedents relevant to the DCs approach; structure the key characteristics; and expound the input factors, impacting factors, desired outcomes and assessment yardsticks. Research limitations/implications: This would be a useful resource for researchers working in the area of DCs to explore opportunities for future research. Practical implications: The MA framework helps managers to look at DCs more holistically, and hence would help them in developing, managing and retaining DCs in organizations. Originality/value: This study is the original work contributed by the authors and has no specific organizational reference. This research implies new directions to look beyond individual DCs in firms toward a more integrated theory building.

Macrofungi have long been investigated for various scientific purposes including their food and medicinal characteristics. Their role in aerobiology as a fraction of the primary biological aerosol particles (PBAPs), however, has been poorly studied. In this study, we present a source of macrofungi with two different but interdependent objectives: (i) to characterize the macrofungi from a tropical dry evergreen biome in southern India using advanced molecular techniques to enrich the database from this region, and (ii) to assess whether identified species of macrofungi are a potential source of atmospheric PBAPs. From the DNA analysis, we report the diversity of the terrestrial macrofungi from a tropical dry evergreen biome robustly supported by the statistical analyses for diversity conclusions. A total of 113 macrofungal species belonging to 54 genera and 23 families were recorded, with Basidiomycota and Ascomycota constituting 96% and 4% of the species, respectively. The highest species richness was found in the family Agaricaceae (25.3%) followed by Polyporaceae (15.3%) and Marasmiaceae (10.8%). The difference in the distribution of commonly observed macrofungal families over this location was compared with other locations in India (Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, and West Bengal) using two statistical tests. The distributions of the terrestrial macrofungi were distinctly different in each ecosystem. We further attempted to demonstrate the potential role of terrestrial macrofungi as a source of PBAPs in ambient air. In our opinion, the findings from this ecosystem of India will enhance our understanding of the distribution, diversity, ecology, and biological prospects of terrestrial macrofungi as well as their potential to contribute to airborne fungal aerosols.

We consider an M/ M/ 1 / N¯ observable non-customer-intensive service queueing system with unknown service rates consisting of strategic impatient customers who make balking decisions and non-strategic patient customers who do not make any decision. In the queueing game amongst the impatient customers, we show that there exists at least one pure threshold strategy equilibrium in the presence of patient customers. As multiple pure threshold strategy equilibria exist in certain cases, we consider the minimal pure threshold strategy equilibrium in our sensitivity analysis. We find that the likelihood ratio of a fast server to a slow server in an empty queue is monotonically decreasing in the proportion of impatient customers and monotonically increasing in the waiting area capacity. Further, we find that the minimal pure threshold strategy equilibrium is non-increasing in the proportion of impatient customers and non-decreasing in the waiting area capacity. We also show that at least one pure threshold strategy equilibrium exists when the waiting area capacity is infinite.

The Government of India has implemented Solar PV based microgrid Decentralized Distributed Generation (DDG) projects in different parts of the country. The monitoring of the performance of DDG projects is a manual process with reliance on the data provided by the system integrators who oversee the DDG projects. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IOT), the monitoring evaluation can be improved dramatically by making it objective, and also to monitor the performance of the policy progress on a near real-time basis. The characteristics of an LPWAN technology viz., LoRa that makes it an appropriate communication technology for remote monitoring of DDG projects are: Long-range, Low power, Small data requirements, and flexibility to operate in unlicensed spectrum. An open-source Internet of Things (IOT) solution is proposed here to monitor and evaluate the rural electrification projects. The methodology involves the development of a low-cost prototype and an open-source based solution to monitor the performance of a DC-based stand-alone solar photovoltaic system, which was set up in the IIT Madras campus. The integration across the LoRaWAn architecture was demonstrated, and a visualization dashboard was created in the Ubidots IOT platform to monitor basic parameters such as voltage and current. The goal is to monitor the solar DC system in terms of the objectives set in DDG policy.

For a first time student, the extent, reach and disbursement of literature on policy implementation can be perplexing. Public policy implementation research has witnessed resurgence in recent years marked by an ever widening interest reflected in copious output in varied fields. This micro diffusion of policy areas has brought in its wake an ever increasing challenge of implementation. Its subsequent research has also created an extremely huge and dense volume of literature. The objectives of this paper are four fold: first to bring together as much as possible, the seminal literature on implementation to provide an intrinsic understanding of the subject matter. Second, we aim to trace the influence of strategic management on policy implementation. Third, by putting the literature in this order we hope to demystify the content of and the boundaries of this space. Last, we hope to outline the direction of future research in this field.

Purpose: Extant research on comparative advertising has focused only on “market leader” comparisons (a brand targeting the market leader), whereas in the marketplace, “multi-brand” comparisons are more prevalent (Kalro et al., 2010). Moreover, most research focuses on direct comparisons only. Hence, this research aims to investigate the interplay between comparison ad strategy (“market leader”/“multi-brand” comparisons) and comparison ad format (direct/indirect comparisons) on the effectiveness of comparative advertising. Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses four 2 × 2 fully crossed factorial designs (comparison ad format: direct vs indirect and comparison ad strategy: market leader vs multi brand) with established and new brands in two categories: powdered detergents and smart phones. All studies were conducted in metropolitan cities of India. Findings: By and large, the experiments indicated that direct (indirect) comparisons lowered (heightened) perceived manipulative intent and enhanced (reduced) attitude-toward-the-ad for multi-brand (market leader) comparisons. Practical implications: Findings suggest that when advertisers use comparative advertising, they may use direct ads when using multi-brand comparisons and use indirect ones when using market leader comparisons. It could also be argued that when advertisers use multi-brand comparisons because of fragmentation in the marketplace, they may directly compare against these multiple brands. When advertisers need to compare against a market leader, they may do so indirectly. Originality/value: This research is among the first to investigate multi-brand comparisons that are widely used in the industry and that too in the context of both direct and indirect comparison formats.

Planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the duration of a task due to the optimistic bias of individuals. We design a mechanism from the principal's perspective (an original equipment manufacturer (OEM)) to mitigate the optimistic bias of agents (a contract manufacturer (CM) and a supplier) in a serial supply chain. The OEM determines the deadline of agents by explicitly factoring the agent's planning fallacy in the model through the cost under-estimation factor. Further, we prove that threshold based incentives are better than lump-sum bonus to motivate the supplier and the CM to mitigate procrastination of task.

Supply chains in general and last-mile logistics in particular, have been disrupted due to COVID-19. Though several innovative last-mile logistics solutions have been proposed in the past, they possess certain limitations, especially during COVID-19 motivating the need for an alternative last-mile logistics solution. We present a review of literature related to last-mile logistics and supply chain disruptions to identify the limitations of existing last-mile delivery practices during COVID-19. Using a stylized analytical model, we then propose that “mobile warehouse” can be an effective solution to last-mile logistics issues faced during COVID-19 and beyond under certain conditions. A mobile warehouse is a truck dedicated to a particular geographical location and carries the inventory of various products based on the estimated demand requirements for these products in that geographical location. We provide the condition under which the B2C e-commerce providers find it profitable to adopt a truck as a mobile warehouse to sell high demand items quickly.

This paper describes the ways that students' problem-solving behaviors evolve when solving multi-faceted, context-rich problems within a web-based learning environment. During the semester, groups of two or three students worked on five physics problems that required drawing on more than one concept and, hence, could not be readily solved with simple "plug-and-chug" strategies. The problems were presented to students in a data-rich, online problem-based learning environment that tracked which information items were selected by students as they attempted to solve the problem. The students also completed a variety of tasks, like entering an initial qualitative analysis of the problem into an online form. Students were not constrained to complete these tasks in any specific order. As they gained more experience in solving context-rich physics problems, student groups showed some progression towards expert-like behavior as they completed qualitative analysis earlier and were more selective in their perusal of informational resources. However, there was room for more improvement as approximately half of the groups still completed the qualitative analysis task towards the end of the problem-solving process rather than at the beginning of the task when it would have been most useful to their work. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.