We test theory regarding the within-group dynamics linking employees’ leader fairness judgments to the receipt of idiosyncratic deals (‘i-deals’), and how differences between workgroups in the extent and variability of i-deals influence workgroup performance. We assert that employees, their co-workers, and the workgroup leader are three key stakeholders to i-deals. Drawing on fairness heuristic theory, we hypothesize that employees are more likely to obtain i-deals when they view their workgroup leaders as procedurally fair. Further, individual perceptions of leader fairness exist within the context of their co-workers’ perceptions of leader fairness, that is, (in)congruence between the two affects individual i-deals. At the workgroup level, we hypothesize a positive association between the access and extent of i-deals and workgroup performance. Employing polynomial regression on data from 258 employees nested in 69 workgroups, we find that congruence between individual and co-workers’ perceptions of leader fairness is positively related to the individual’s receipt of i-deals; incongruence has an asymmetric effect, such that individual perceptions matter more. Finally, within-group access and extent of i-deals are positively related to group performance. © 2021 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The ongoing pandemic of Coronavirus disease has already affected more than 300,000 people. In this study, we propose an appropriate auto-regressive integrated moving-average model with time-varying parameters to analyze the trend pattern of the early incidence of COVID-19 outbreak, and subsequently, estimate the basic reproduction number (Formula presented.) for different countries. We also incorporate information on total or partial lockdown into the model. The model is concise and flexible in structure. For (Formula presented.) we use the maximum likelihood method and estimate it for different serial interval distributions. Proper diagnostic measures establish that a time-varying quadratic trend successfully captures the incidence pattern of the disease. We find that the number of affected cases starts increasing more rapidly three to four weeks after the first case is identified. Countrywide lockdown has been effective in reducing the growth rate of the disease in Italy. Estimated (Formula presented.) of the 2019 novel Coronavirus ranges between 1.4 and 3.2 in different countries, except for the United States where it is higher. A much-needed outcome is that the method gives insight into what epidemiological stage a region is in. This has the potential to help in prompting policies to address the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries. © 2022 International Biometric Society–Chinese Region.

All developed countries are facing the problem of providing affordable and high quality healthcare in recent years. This is due to the combination of an ageing population and the technological advancement in health science which leads to an increased life expectancy. This will affect the future use of hospital inpatient and outpatient services which in turn will place a significant stress on the economy since most medical services for the elderly are apportioned and funded under a national system. Thus, understanding the demand for healthcare and other key factors influencing the demand is crucial to better serve citizens. Hospital admission is considered to be a key proxy of the demand for healthcare, especially in the context of ageing populations as experienced globally. However, modeling hospital admissions, although very important, is often complicated by zero-inflation, by the covariates with time-varying effects, and by the necessity of borrowing information across individuals. Additionally, the rate of hospital admissions might differ between the group of individuals who have been hospitalized before and the group yet to be hospitalized. Also when individuals are clustered based on their baseline self-assessed health status, the distribution of hospital admissions and its relation to predictors may be quite different across and within different groups. In this paper we propose a unified Bayesian dynamic hurdle model which accommodates these features of the data in a semi-parametric approach. We analyze the data collected by the United States Health and Retirement Study in which the rate of hospital admissions varies across different self-assessed health groups. Simulation studies are performed for assessing the usefulness of the proposed model. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Digital identity platforms are a recent e-governance innovation for improving social assistance programming in developing countries, the most well-known of which is India’s Aadhaar. While a significant number of studies have accumulated on Aadhaar, so far under-researched is the importance of local government practices and processes in shaping usage of the platform to support social assistance programming. In this paper we theorize how local government intermediation on digital identity platforms can improve social assistance programming through a case study of the Aadhaar-enabled Fertilizer Distribution System (AeFDS) in Andhra Pradesh. Our findings show how the relevance of the platform for low-income farmers depends crucially on the proactive adaptation of the technology by key local government intermediaries. From a policy perspective, this result emphasizes the importance of supporting efforts to acknowledge the role of responsive local government agencies in ensuring that centralized digital identity platforms remain relevant for implementing social assistance programming. © 2021 Commonwealth Secretariat.

Increasing depression and mental health problems among the elderly during the pandemic have become a grave concern. In the present study, we borrowed from the emotional contagion theory and examined the association between social media use (SMU) and depression among the elderly during the pandemic. Our findings suggest that active but not passive SMU is positively related to depression. Moreover, we also examined if SMU (both active and passive) has a varying effect on the mental health of the elderly based on their race, i.e. blacks and whites. Our findings suggest that active SMU is detrimental for both blacks and whites, whereas passive SMU is positively related to depression only among blacks. Further, we undertook multiperiod analyses where depression scores were measured at four different time periods. We found that the adverse impact of SMU on depression persists over time. The present study draws attention to the antecedents of depression among the elderly during COVID-19. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Alertness is increasingly associated with entrepreneurial opportunities. However, ambiguity in the conceptualization and operationalization of the construct have limited its potential and utility for entrepreneurship research. Given the variations in treatment of alertness, we investigate the concept as it is currently evolving in entrepreneurship scholarship. With this examination, we bring to the forefront inconsistencies and emerging trends regarding the nomological alignment and measurement of alertness. This review and synthesis of alertness research clarifies conceptual inconsistencies stemming from its Kirznerian roots and offers a framework with agenda for entrepreneurial alertness research. This agenda includes the application of entrepreneurial alertness to the opportunity creation paradigm. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Can ordinary consumers be persuaded to choose reward-based crowdfunding over retail purchase to own new technologies? To investigate, we developed a C2P (consumer-to-patron) Persuasion Model and tested it using mixed-factorial experimental design. Results showed positive influence of crowdfunding discounts on consumers’ likelihood to fund/refer which was negatively moderated by the expected waiting time to receive product. Affective cues helped with getting referrals but not donations. Technology attractiveness and price, along with consumers’ gender and risk-propensity had significant influences. Based on the findings, we recommend technopreneurs to consciously target ordinary consumers for funding, and e-commerce and crowdfunding platforms to form design synergies. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Predicting a dengue outbreak well ahead of time is of immense importance to healthcare personnel. In this study, an ensemble method based on three different types of models has been developed. The proposed approach combines negative binomial regression, autoregressive integrated moving average model and generalized linear autoregressive moving average model through a vector autoregressive structure. Lagged values of terrain and climate covariates are used as regressors. Real-life application using data from San Juan and Iquitos shows that the proposed method usually incurs a mean absolute error of less than 10 cases when the predictions are made 8 weeks in advance. Furthermore, using model confidence set procedure, it is also shown that the proposed method always outperforms other candidate models in providing early prediction for a dengue epidemic. © 2021 Royal Statistical Society

During peak-hour busy airports have the challenge of turning aircraft around as quickly as possible, which includes sequencing their landings and take-offs with maximum efficiency, without sacrificing safety. This problem, termed aircraft sequencing problem (ASP) has traditionally been hard to solve optimally in real-time, even for flights over a one-hour planning window. In this article, we present a novel data-splitting algorithm to solve the ASP on a single runway with the objective to minimize the total delay in the system both under segregated and mixed mode of operation. The problem is formulated as a 0–1 mixed integer program, taking into account several realistic constraints, including safety separation standards, wide time-windows, and constrained position shifting. Following divide-and-conquer paradigm, the algorithm divides the given set of flights into several disjoint subsets, each of which is optimized using 0–1 MIP while ensuring the optimality of the entire set. One hour peak-traffic instances of this problem, which is NP-hard in general, are computationally difficult to solve with direct application of the commercial solver, as well as existing state-of-the-art dynamic programming method. Using our data-splitting algorithm, various randomly generated instances of the problem can be solved optimally in near real-time, with time savings of over 90%. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Our framed laboratory experiment analyses the causal relationship between corruption and tax evasion and explores whether deterring one may have desirable spill over effects on the other. We find that the possibility of corruption causally increases tax evasion. The data offers weak evidence that tax evasion leads to more corruption. Introducing a policy to detect and punish public officials who embezzle from tax revenues significantly reduces tax evasion on the part of citizens. However, auditing and punishing tax-evading citizens do not deter embezzlement on the part of public officials. The public good provision increases in all deterrence treatments compared to a baseline, with a “Big bang” treatment in which both tax evasion and corruption are liable to be detected and punished being the most effective. A standalone anti-corruption monitoring and punishment strategy is the next most effective policy followed by tax auditing. Thus, when faced with two “evils” regarding the public good provision, allocating more resources to fight corruption may be a better policy response. © 2022

Employee engagement is critical for the sustenance of organizations. Scholars have highlighted that the employer-employee interaction is an essential mechanism that enhances employee engagement. The communicative and interactional features of AI applications in HRM allow for a personalized and individualized approach to employees. The proliferation of AI-based solutions is increasing in various dimensions of HR business processes, leading to enhanced employee experiences and job satisfaction. However, this research domain is exploratory concerning the impact of AI-mediation HRM practices. Based on a multi-source, time-lagged study spanning over ten months in a multinational company, we have investigated the impact of AI-enabled chatbots on employee engagement in the present study. We have also examined climate for trust as the path through which chatbots impact engagement. Moreover, we have analyzed the implications of AI-enabled chatbots on employee outcomes based on their age and past performance. The contributions of the study to theory and practice have also been discussed. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

When building new ventures, entrepreneurs confront the three problems of Knightian uncertainty, goal ambiguity, and isotropy. The literature on effectuation offers a framework for action, interaction, and reaction within the prediction control space that can help entrepreneurs tackle the above three problems. In this article, we offer a framework consisting of four approaches to negotiation that populate the prediction-control space, namely, Pitch, Help, Deal, and (Effectual) Ask. While we emphasize the effectual quadrant, we examine all four from a practical perspective informed by theory, while forging important connections with established works in negotiation research. Along the way, we offer illustrative examples as well as ideas for future research at the nexus of entrepreneurship and negotiation. © 2022 The Authors. Negotiation Journal published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of President and Fellows of Harvard College.

As technology-based enterprises (TBEs) are more promising than non-technology firms, there is a strong case for their incubation and promotion. However, TBEs use incubators not as support providers for idea incubation but to control costs incurred to develop and implement their ideas, thus defying the objective of incubation. Different types of incubators, such as commercial, social and university business incubators (UBIs), have different types of tangible and intangible resource offerings for their incubatees. Entrepreneurs utilize these resources based on their needs to save costs and reduce risks. Drawing from the conversations with the serial incubatees it was evident that once their access to resources at one incubation centre is exhausted, they move to another incubation centre for further fulfillment of their enterprise’s needs. Our analysis based on 20 interviews with the entrepreneurs of TBEs reveals a need-heed gap between the incubatees and incubators, which will have to be reduced for incubators to remain relevant to firms and effective for entrepreneurs.There is a need for a ‘hybridized incubation’ arrangement for TBEs in which incubators will have to pay heed to their roles as providers of specialized resources from both academia and industry. © 2022 International Management Institute, New Delhi.

The discovery and the spread of COVID-19 have forced countries to implement measures such as lockdown, resulting in economic slumps. These epidemic outbreaks always challenged humans, but we didn't fail to find opportunities in the midst of them and COVID-19 is also not an exception. Based on the SDGs Goal 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), this study attempts to analyze the current external environment such as the political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological environment in the Indian perspective. The business opportunities and challenges arising from these environmental factors are discussed. Earlier pandemic and war outbreaks and the positive outcomes of these outbreaks are also discussed in this paper. © The Electrochemical Society

With the growing importance of sustainable farming and increasing fluctuations in the price of agricultural produce, the choice of nature of farming and participation in a cooperative has become critical. This paper examines farmers’ decision of adopting organic farming and participating in cooperative institutions to market their produce. We formulate a two-stage strategic game model whereby two farmers first choose a technique of production of their crops followed by a decision regarding the mechanism by which to sell their products to cope with the environment of uncertain agricultural prices. We extend the two-stage process to find out conditions under which it would be profitable for a farmer to produce organic crop. We found that farmers are more likely to produce organic crop if they can sell their produce through a cooperative. Our analytical results show that incremental costs of organic production, the operational cost of running cooperatives and crop’s price volatility can be crucial in influencing farmers’ choice of production techniques of and marketing institutions. In particular, we found that when it is easier for farmers to participate in cooperative, they tend to choose organic production technique. To empirically support the findings, we analyzed the weekly transactions of 65 Fruits and Vegetables during 2017 in six different regions in the United States. We found that regions with higher number of cooperatives registered higher transactions in organic crop. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

The low rate of cadaveric organ donation is a challenge that most countries struggle with. In this study, we examine factors and alternate decision-making setups that influence the supply of cadaveric organs, and identify possible incentives and mechanisms to increase it. We develop a model that captures the interaction between supply-side entities – a coordinating organisation, whose objective is to maximise the social welfare, and a hospital that performs the organ retrieval. Under different setups, we evaluate the two levers available to the coordinating organisation, its own effort and reimbursement fees, which can be used to induce higher effort by hospitals. We contrast these decisions and payoffs to determine if any benefits are forthcoming from the coordinating organisation's effort commitment. We also examine the hospital's optimal channel decision in the presence of an unauthorised channel and a low paying authorised channel, and derive the conditions under which the hospital would prefer the authorised channel over the unauthorised channel. Our results provide insights that lead to better outcomes for the players, and result in the improved organ donation rate. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot be underestimated, there exists a technical perspective where digital and IS technology has a role to play in the monitoring of potential solutions, but also an integral element of climate change solutions. We explore these aspects in this editorial article, offering a comprehensive opinion based insight to a multitude of diverse viewpoints that look at the many challenges through a technology lens. It is widely recognized that technology in all its forms, is an important and integral element of the solution, but industry and wider society also view technology as being part of the problem. Increasingly, researchers are referencing the importance of responsible digitalization to eliminate the significant levels of e-waste. The reality is that technology is an integral component of the global efforts to get to net zero, however, its adoption requires pragmatic tradeoffs as we transition from current behaviors to a more climate friendly society. © 2021 The Authors

We present asset ownership estimates for men and women from Georgia, Mongolia, and the Philippines using individual-level data collected through household surveys. The concept of asset ownership includes reported and documented ownership and alienation rights (right to sell and right to bequeath) over property. We find significant gender gaps in property ownership–land, dwelling, and other real estate–for reported and documented owners. Further, our results suggest a positive correlation between documented ownership and alienation rights. Women documented owners are more likely to have some alienation rights and less likely to report having no rights. Women, across countries, are also less likely to be exclusive owners of property than men. We find mixed evidence of divergence of ownership estimates for a sub-sample of households based on whether the information was collected by self-reporting or proxy-reporting. The results reinforce the usefulness of collecting high-quality individual-level asset data for a deeper understanding of economic inequality within the household and for adopting a multidimensional approach to understanding gendered property ownership. We also identify the need for deeper research on marital regimes and their impact on women’s property ownership. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

To minimize greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the Government of India has launched schemes to promote the electric mobility through providing financial assistance for procurement of electric vehicles. Various “State Transport Undertakings (STUs)” have initiated the procurement process for EV Buses and to avail the incentives through Gross Cost Contract (GCC) Model or Outright Purchase Model. The choice of the appropriate model is dependent on many factors such as operational and financial capacity of the STU, competency of the private collaborator, public transport profile of the city, expected revenue, and estimated per kilometer cost of the transportation. This paper has attempted to propose a decision support framework for STUs which can be used to discern the sensitivity of overall cost with various components by assuming different scenarios to exhibit their influence on aggregate cost of operations and procurement of EV buses. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Purpose: Firms are increasingly making customers key stakeholders in their greening processes, requiring them to voluntarily use their resources to benefit the firm. In this context, this paper develops a new construct – tangible customer citizenship behaviour (CCB), i.e. voluntary participation of customer in operational processes of the company beyond normal requirements of exchange. This requires more involvement than the already documented intangible CCB. The purpose of the paper is to then explore whether service quality (SQ) (online and offline) influences such voluntary customer reciprocity in greening. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a virtual survey among 400 customers of e-commerce firms that have adopted greening practices requiring customer engagement and regressions were used to test the hypotheses. Findings: The authors find that both online and offline SQ positively impact intangible CCB but have no impact on customer greening reciprocity (tangible CCB). Additionally, the authors find that offline SQ positively impacts customer greening awareness. However, in spite of the presence of greening awareness and display of intangible CCB, SQ does not have any impact on greening reciprocity. Originality/value: This study introduces to literature a more tangible form of voluntary behaviour on the part of the customer, i.e. tangible CCB or reciprocity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also one of the first to study the customer as an important stakeholder and participant in a business-to-consumer firm’s operating processes, particularly in greening which has no direct impact on the firm’s core offering. The focus on greening in the Indian context is also novel given the greening costs and requirements and the price competition are very different in emerging market contexts where e-commerce firms are experiencing the maximum growth. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.