Department of Management Studies

Systems and their environments must be understood in an integrated manner because any changes in the systems will affect their environments and vice versa in the ubiquitous open systems. Existing studies classify systems based on the diversity of their interactions and the systems' responses to changes in their environments. However, the uses of such classifications are limited. We attempt to address this limitation by using morphological analysis (MA) to identify, represent and characterise the general system–environment complex (SEC) and its components. The latter, called ‘dimensions’, and their respective manifestations, termed ‘variants’, are integrated into the MA representation to enable a holistic understanding of SECs in terms of six dimensions and 101 variants. The resultant representation and characterisation will help researchers identify potential research opportunities, demonstrated through the construction of a variants intersection matrix, and help develop practical principles for system design and evaluation.

The use of association rule mining techniques in diverse contexts and domains has resulted in the creation of numerous interestingness measures. This, in turn, has motivated researchers to come up with various classification schemes for these measures. One popular approach to classify the objective measures is to assess the set of mathematical properties they satisfy in order to help practitioners select the right measure for a given problem. In this research, we discuss the insufficiency of the existing properties in the literature to capture certain behaviors of interestingness measures. This motivates us to adopt an approach where a measure is described by how it varies if there is a unit change in the frequency count (f11, f10, f01, f00) , at different preexisting states of the counts. This rate of change analysis is formally defined as the first partial derivative of the measure with respect to the various frequency counts. We use this analysis to define two novel properties, unit-null asymptotic invariance (UNAI) and unit-null zero rate (UNZR). UNAI looks at the asymptotic effect of adding frequency patterns, while UNZR looks at the initial effect of adding frequency patterns when they do not preexist in the dataset. We present a comprehensive analysis of 50 interestingness measures and classify them in accordance with the two properties. We also present multiple empirical studies, involving both synthetic and real-world datasets, which are used to cluster various measures according to the rule ranking patterns of the measures. The study concludes with the observation that classification of measures using the empirical clusters shares significant similarities to the classification of measures done through the properties presented in this research.

Capital creation is dependent on energy.

Influence of institutional ownership has been hypothesised to efficiently monitor the managerial decisions especially discretionary role of managers in reporting earnings. The managers have been found to misrepresent the quality of earnings for a dividend declaration; new issue; takeovers and for affirming debt holders of their financial position. Panel data methodology focusing on firms listed in CNX 500 in National Stock Exchange empirically examines the impact of institutional ownership on the earnings management practices in India. Earnings management is measured using discretionary accounting accruals. Firms with higher institutional holdings are found to have higher earnings quality thus restricting managers from using their discretionary powers to report earnings. Institutional ownership has a negative relationship with earnings management for larger and matured firms. Growing firms are found to be having higher earnings management. Institutional investors monitor the firms and hence reduce aggressive earnings management practices within the firm. Foreign institutional ownership also has a negative relationship with earnings management.

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.

We develop a framework for understanding the mechanisms of information privacy assimilation in information technology (IT) organizations. Following neo-institutional theory, we develop a broad conceptual model and further build a detailed theory based on a multi-site, multi-case study of 18 organizations. We treat information privacy as a distinct dimension separate from information security. As in the case of information security, senior management support emerged as a mediator between the external influences of coercive, mimetic, and normative forces and information privacy assimilation. Privacy capability emerged as a distinct construct that had a moderating effect on the influence of coercive and normative forces on privacy assimilation. Similarly, cultural acceptability also moderated the effect of external forces on privacy assimilation. We produce a theoretical model that future research can empirically test. The findings would enable senior managers identify and respond to institutional pressures by focusing on appropriate factors in the organizations.

In this paper, we develop branch-and-bound algorithms for objectives such as sum of weighted flowtime, weighted tardiness and weighted earliness of jobs, for an m- machine no-wait (continuous) flowshop. We believe that there has been no prior work on exact algorithms for this problem setup with a variety of objective functions. For the interest of space, we confine our discussion to a subset of certain combination of these objectives and the extension to other objective combinations is quite straight-forward. We explore the active nodes of a branch-and-bound tree by deriving an assignment-matrix based lower bound, that ensures one-to-one correspondence of a job with its due date and weight. This idea is based on our earlier paper on general m- machine permutation flowshop (Madhushini et al. in J Oper Res Soc 60(7):991–1004, 2009) and here we exploit the intricate features of a no-wait flowshop to develop efficient lower bounds. Finally, we conclude our paper with the numerical evaluation of our branch-and-bound algorithms.

Corporate Social Performances (CSP) has a determining role in the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores of firms. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy scores in the ESG ratings can provide a measure of the CSP concerts of firms. We observe in this research, the mean differences in the CSR strategy scores and the ESG scores of firms in select developed economies such as; US, UK, Japan, and Australia, representing different geographical regions globally. Thomson Reuters ESG scores based on ten major parameters and over 400 company level indicators are used to empirically evidence the study. The initial data of average performances on ESG indicators of 939 firms considered for a period of five years from 2014 to 2018 is analyzed. The results imply that the mean differences in the CSR strategy scores are not significant, considering the developed economies, deliberated in the study. Along with that, we observe a significant mean difference in the ESG scores of Australian firms considered for the study, in comparison with the firms from other developed economies. And the study confirm that the CSR strategy scores are significant predictors of ESG performance scores of firms in the developed economies considered for study.

There has been rapid growth in private equity (PE) investment in infrastructure over the last decade. This article is an analysis of PE funding in infrastructure based on data from Indian projects. Data from 335 infrastructure projects with PE investment and 370 projects with no PE investment have been used in the analysis. The average investment in projects made by foreign PE investors was higher than that of domestic PE investors. The average investment made by a mix of domestic and foreign investors was significantly higher than the average investment sizes of a group of either the domestic or foreign investors, suggesting that the presence of domestic investors increased the comfort level for foreign investors to enter the market. The main motivation for syndication was to pool capital from different investors. The overall characteristics of the operating environment also play an important role in attracting PE investment. States that had higher values of PPP and Property Right Indices and lower corruption levels attracted PE investment in more projects. Comparing the state level characteristics of projects with and without PE investment showed that PE investors are prepared to invest in riskier environments than other investors.

The purpose of this study was to test the association among occupational stress, coping strategies, mental health, physical health and job satisfaction. A paper-and-pencil survey battery comprising of five scales was completed by 360 participants. Results indicate that there is negative association between occupational stress and health (both mental and physical), also occupational stress with job satisfaction. Furthermore, there is an impact of coping strategies on the health and the attitudinal outcome (job satisfaction) of the participants. Findings convey that there exist significant differences among the dimensions of job satisfaction, relationship dynamics' is reported to be the principal dissatisfying factor. Organisations continuously demand the best performance from its employees and for this very reason, their stress levels have to be managed. Coping strategies have to be devised to manage the occupational stress so that the employees are physically and mentally fit to perform their job. In addition, employees must be aware of their stress prone areas and the coping strategies suitable for them.