In recent times, the increasing healthcare spending due to the rising health awareness signifies the importance of identifying the appropriate factors that influence patient satisfaction, weight assignment to these factors, and measurement of patient satisfaction becomes important. However, devising a robust objective weighting method for weight assignment of the factors and an analytical method for determining patient satisfaction scores has not been paid enough attention. Motivated by these issues, this work focuses on devising a robust objective weighting method for weight assignment of the factors that influence patient satisfaction, an analytical method for determining patient satisfaction, and real-life implementation. We first propose a joint weighting methodology to allocate the weights to the factors by integrating the weights determined by different objective weighting methods, namely, mean weight, SD, entropy, criteria importance through intercriteria correlation, and preference selection index-based approaches. Next, using the weights of these factors, we design a modified weighted aggregated sum product assessment method to determine a single patient satisfaction score by integrating the scores obtained from the weighted sum model and the weighted product model. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world dataset provided by a large healthcare provider and diagnostic clinic in Kolkata, India, to exhibit the real-life implementation. The theoretical insights obtained through non-parametric tests highlight the significant difference between joint weighting-based and single weighting-based methods. The context-specific insights signify that the patients suffering from arthritis and hyperlipidaemia exhibit lower satisfaction. Also, the patients suffering from dengue express lower satisfaction than the patients suffering from malaria. Additionally, the healthcare provider should focus on improving the service quality of the departments such as ophthalmology, ENT, and dietician. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

In this article, we use a novel dataset on new investment projects undertaken, available for states in India in quarterly frequency, to forecast economic activities in the wake of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Panel data estimates for the country, employing fixed effect and Generalized Method of Moments, show a drop of approximately 50% in investment count during the financial years 2019–20 to 2021–22, compared to the counterfactual projection of an increase of 38% over the same period. State-level analysis reveals similar patterns, even though with considerable heterogeneity–relatively economically well-developed states may witness higher reduction in investment compared to the less developed ones. Given that incidence of Covid cases is also relatively higher in the more developed states, our findings can help in formulating policies appropriate for each state. This study can be generalized in the following three ways: it can be extended over a longer period of time, it can be applied in future crisis periods, and it can be made more precise given more granular data is available. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This study develops a conceptual model of organizational IT assimilation maturity based on constructs in the IS literature, qualitative data analysis of three exploratory case studies, and general morphological analysis (GMA). We inductively extract four dimensions of IT assimilation – business processes, information architecture, IT processes, and end-users – and characterize different maturity levels for each dimension. Applying Zwicky's GMA on the combinatorially large space of IT assimilation configurations, we prune the space to a more limited number of internally consistent and empirically feasible IT assimilation maturity profiles. We discuss how the model can support IT audit and governance activities. © 2021

Using monthly fund-level portfolio holdings data on Indian equity mutual funds, we explore the predictable patterns in the trading biases of fund managers induced by changing attention allocation patterns. In an emerging market setting, we investigate the tendency of fund managers to sell winners and increase their exposure to losing stocks. Their biases are examined during two states of economic cycles. We adjust for random choice probability while selecting funds for reasons unrelated to the disposition effect. Our research contributes to the relatively nascent psychology-based asset pricing literature by examining fund managers’ psychology concerning financial decision-making. © 2022

Operations research (OR) has been at the core of decision making since World War II, and today, business interactions on different platforms have changed business dynamics, introducing a high degree of uncertainty. To have a sustainable vision of their business, firms need to have a suitable decision-making process at each stage, including minute details. Our study reviews and investigates the existing research in the field of decision support systems (DSSs) and how artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities have been integrated into OR. The findings of our review show how AI has contributed to decision making in the operations research field. This review presents synergies, differences, and overlaps in AI, DSSs, and OR. Furthermore, a clarification of the literature based on the approaches adopted to develop the DSS is presented along with the underlying theories. The classification has been primarily divided into two categories, i.e. theory building and application-based approaches, along with taxonomies based on the AI, DSS, and OR areas. In this review, past studies were calibrated according to prognostic capability, exploitation of large data sets, number of factors considered, development of learning capability, and validation in the decision-making framework. This paper presents gaps and future research opportunities concerning prediction and learning, decision making and optimization in view of intelligent decision making in today’s era of uncertainty. The theoretical and managerial implications are set forth in the discussion section justifying the research questions. © 2021, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

This study examines the impact of internationalization on the corporate misconduct of earnings management by emerging market multinational enterprises. We propose that internationalization exposes these firms to heightened scrutiny by meta-institutional field and host country stakeholders, and EMNEs reduce earnings manipulation to avoid de-legitimation in the minds of host-nations’ stakeholders. We find empirical evidence for our predictions on a multi-industry sample of 21,477 firm-year observations belonging to 2,461 Indian firms during 2005 – 2018. Additionally, we find that internationalization induced 'external monitoring' plays a substitutive role for the 'internal monitoring' mechanisms of corporate governance on earnings management. © 2022

The Base of Pyramid (BoP) narrative has been dominated by the consumption perspective, as compared to producers’ perspective. The literature on the constraints faced by BoP producers in such resource-constrained environments remains scattered and fragmented. This paper, therefore, systematically reviews and integrates previous studies dealing with constraints of the base of the pyramid producers. Synthesizing various strands of literature, we suggest eight propositions related to BoP producers’ constraints. We also provide an extended typology of constraints faced by BoP producers. The psycho-social constraints, organizational constraints and institutional constraints are three constituent categories of this extended typology. Drawing from the marketing system view, the article also provides a conceptual framework for advancing a multi-level, recursively related and process-based understanding of these constraints. The article also provides useful directions for future enquiry and explicates several implications for researchers, managers and policymakers. © 2021

The article ‘Financial Inclusion and Household Welfare: An Entropy-Based Consumption Diversifcation Approach’, written by Manisha Chakrabarty and Subhankar Mukherjee, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 22 of July 2021 without open access. With the author(s)’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 13 of September 2021 to © The Author(s), 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. The original article has been corrected. © 2021, The Author(s).

Purpose: The authors study the effect of access to smartphones on the socio-economic well-being in the case of rural base of the pyramid (BoP) women. While smartphone access may have its benefits, the paper suggests augmenting access with a sociotechnical intermediary (STI) that facilitates training and online community building to enhance the well-being outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a survey from three groups of women from rural West Bengal (India) – (1) who do not own smartphones, (2) who have their own smartphones and (3) who receive smartphones and STI support (over two years). The authors evaluate the effect of access to smartphones and STI support on social well-being (including structural social capital and empowerment) and economic well-being (including entrepreneurial intent and subjective economic well-being). Findings: The analysis results suggest a high relationship between smartphone ownership and higher structural social capital, empowerment (in terms of freedom of movement) and entrepreneurial intent. The authors further find these effects to be enhanced amongst women who received smartphones and support from STI. Originality/value: The authors attribute this enhanced well-being amongst women with smartphones and STI support to peer-learning and cultivation of virtual role models facilitated by the STI through creation of intra-community online groups. The results have significant policy implications for socio-economic well-being of rural BoP women. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Changing digital technologies and innovation threaten established business models. Increasing uncertainty in the operating environment often drives the need to transform the core business model of firms through a process of digital business transformation (DBT). In this study, we conduct a longitudinal study of two digital startups in the crowdfunding domain and identify the core attributes driving such transformation in digital ventures. We build a framework that examines how DBT takes place in entrepreneurial firms through information exchange with the environment. This research will help entrepreneurs and managers of such firms design and develop reactive business models for market success. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Private sector banks hold equity capital in excess of the regulatory requirement (400 basis points more from 2006 to 2017). The impact of excess capital in banks is examined through a partial adjustment approach with unbalanced panel data for listed Indian banks from 2006 to 2017. Findings reveal that banks hold excess capital ratios, and private sector banks actively manage higher capital ratios than the public sector banks. The speed of adjustment for private banks is much higher than for public sector ones, and an inverse relationship between non-performing assets and change in equity capital is found. © 2022 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

This study examines whether societal trust diminishes the role that debt plays to mitigate agency problems between managers and shareholders. Using data from 46 countries, we find that societal trust is inversely associated with leverage ratio. Our results are robust to a battery of robustness tests. We also observe that societal trust can substitute for formal institutions, and therefore, the impact of societal trust is weaker for firms located in countries with strong legal institutions. Overall, our study emphasizes the role of informal institutions like societal trust in resolving agency problems stemming from the conflict of interest between shareholders and managers. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

The extant review studies on the Base/bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) have paid inadequate attention to the producer and entrepreneur roles of the poor. This review article exclusively focused on BoP producers and subsistence entrepreneurs provides an overview of the current state of research on BoP producers and subsistence entrepreneurs. It encompasses 130 articles from 67 peer-reviewed academic journals and develops an organizing framework for classifying these articles. The conceptual model of entrepreneurship in poverty contexts presented in this article illustrates the drivers, barriers, facilitators and consequences of subsistence entrepreneurship. The conceptual model helps to highlight the relevance of contextually informed public support and advocates adopting a collaborative approach for addressing various challenges faced by BoP producers. We also discuss the implications of our article and provide directions for future research. © The Author(s) 2022.

Although extant research shows that the environmental crisis enables entrepreneurial activities in for-profit firms, the relationship between the environmental crisis and entrepreneurial activities in the non-profit public sector organizations could not draw sufficient attention from the researchers. These organizations enjoy limited flexibility within a bounded framework under government rules and protocols. Hence, the scope of implementing creative and innovative measures is restricted by those guidelines. It leads to a pertinent question about the possibility of entrepreneurial activities in public sector organizations. To explore the sources of such activities, we conduct participatory case research at a government school—Kendriya Vidyalaya Ordnance Factory Dum Dum, located in Kolkata, India. The usual teaching-learning process in the school has stopped at the onset of the COVID pandemic. The school has undertaken various novel and innovative steps within a guided framework mandated by the government to ensure continuity of education. Our reflexive process study uncovers that the strict rules, usually followed in regular times, are relaxed in the event of an environmental crisis, and the organizations are provided flexibility to adopt various unique measures considering the broader objective. The crisis enacts sensemaking that causes the organizations to implement entrepreneurial activities beyond the pre-defined path. In this process, the organizations can unearth hidden potentials and strengthen their usual operation in various dimensions, making the delivery mechanism more focused and effective. The theorization contributes to the extant literature by proposing a process model in which environmental crisis acts as an enabler to transform the existing mode of operation through entrepreneurial activities. It also shows the possibility of such activities in a restricted setup during a crisis. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

Employee–employer disputes have a long history. Being on different sides of the same coin, they have their own opinions and perspectives. These differences in narratives, viewpoints and disagreements have widened due to the sudden shift to a virtual workplace setting owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden transformation has rendered many jobless, whereas many others have faced challenges with teleworking. This article thus aims to explore the differing viewpoints of the teleworking employees and their managerial counterparts from various accounting, e-commerce and information technology (IT) sector firms, using a qualitative phenomenological methodology based on the abduction approach. Managers in India mostly follow a paternalistic managerial style to retain control and authority, which would dissolve in telework. The findings show the differences in managerial and employee perspectives regarding the major restructuring of the human resource (HR) practices, including the appraisal mechanism, work environment, social isolation, work–life (im)balance, technological difficulties, workplace monitoring, retrenchment and work contracts. We conclude that the virtual workspaces including the hybrid model of work, remote work with geographical requirements and co-working spaces, would be the future of Indian white-collared workers. © 2022 International Management Institute, New Delhi.

The paper argues both theoretically and empirically that incidence of extortion reduces the flow of private investment at a state in a federation. The states compete in terms of their firm/industry-specific investment to retain the investment in their own jurisdiction. It uses the data from Indian states for the empirical analysis. The spatial regression technique used in the analysis takes into account the proximity of the states in terms of their industry-specific investment and finds that the states similar in terms of industry-specific investment have similar private manufacturing investment. Also, a higher rate of extortion in a state creates a negative spill-over effect on the flow of private investment in the state from the private investment in other similar states. The results suggest that a policy of controlling extortion has significant return in terms of flow of private investment in a state, which is not mitigated through industry-specific investment. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

The recent crisis of COVID-19 poses a serious threat to the smooth functioning of the finance education in Indian business schools. Both general and specific pedagogical issues related to finance education crop up. However, innovation at institute and individual instructor level mitigates such threats to large extent and successfully maintains the desired learning environment for students in the ‘virtual’ mode. © 2022 XLRI Jamshedpur, School of Business Management & Human Resources.

State-led financial inclusion programmes have been implemented in many developing countries, but their effectiveness in raising welfare remains widely debated. In this article, we report evidence on this issue, against the backdrop of recent policy initiatives on financial inclusion in India. We employ Theil’s entropy-based index to estimate diversification in consumption expenditure, and use this as a measure of welfare. Using household-level panel data across all regions of the country, we find evidence that greater financial inclusion increases diversity in non-food items. Further, we also notice that there is a shift in consumption basket from food items to non-food items. These findings suggest an improvement in welfare for both rural as well as urban households. © 2021, The Author(s).

This paper attempts to analyse the limitations of contractual mechanisms of resolving collective action disputes against sovereign debtors. The Global South has been at the receiving end of the sovereign debt obligations and collective action clauses (CACs) agenda. The lack of control over the domestic economy and the human rights impacts of mounting sovereign debt brings to the fore the absolute lack of fairness and equity in the CAC-based framework for restructuring sovereign debt. The contemporary international order does not address the non-economic concerns of an indebted state. The unfair treatment meted out to the Global South opens the need for Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) voices against sovereign debt. The current discourse and literature on CAC have remained mainly aloof to the contributions and importance of TWAIL in the context of CACs. Sovereign debt and the use of CACs need a fresh outlook based on the development of international human rights law. Alternative movements based on Global South solidarity against the present structural and systemic problems of sovereign debt and CACs need to be explored. © 2022 Global South Ltd.

Purpose: Amidst the exponential spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to explore the evolving dynamics underlying consumers' narratives about luxury-brands over social media. While visualizing these Online Luxury-Brand Self-Narratives (OLBSNs) as a decision-making situation, the authors question the “rational-being” assumption of the Net Valence Model (NVM) during a pandemic situation. Specifically, the authors draw upon Terror Management Theory (TMT) to explicate the role of pandemic-induced mortality salience in rendering the idealistic assumptions of NVM unattainable. The authors uncover evidence of risk-taking behavior among luxury consumers while using OLBSNs as a potential meaning-providing structure during the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: This study employed a cross-sectional survey method. The authors conducted a structured Qualtrics survey to collect data from 588 respondents. The authors examined the hypothesized relationships using structural equation modeling. Findings: In contrast to the conventional wisdom of NVM, the results suggest a positive influence of not only perceived benefits but also perceived risks on intention to engage in OLBSN and brand advocacy during the ongoing pandemic. Research limitations/implications: This study explains the emerging dynamics of pandemic-induced mortality salience in OLBSN decision-making and has implications for luxury-brand marketers in designing brand communication strategies over social media. Originality/value: This study makes an original endeavor to extend NVM beyond rational decision-making context by integrating the theoretical tenets of TMT within NVM while also delineating the decision-making mechanism of OLBSNs during the pandemic. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.