Economics

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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.

World University root node

Finance, Accounting and Control

(SME) School of Management and Entrepreneurship

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences

Customer reciprocity in greening: the role of service quality

I examine the effect of decision-making processes on the dynamics of bargaining over a fixed pie by comparing the share received when individuals are subject to reference-dependent preferences, loss-aversion, and probability-weighting, to the share they would receive on choosing by maximising expected utility instead. I show that: (i) reference-dependent preferences are unambiguously advantageous, (ii) loss-aversion does not have any effect, and (iii) probability-weighting is unambiguously disadvantageous. Finally, when these three features come together so that the decision-making process is described by cumulative prospect theory, then a higher share is obtained if and only if the advantage conferred by reference-dependent preferences is stronger than the disadvantage imposed by probability-weighting, and I present a precise necessary and sufficient condition that expresses this trade-off. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control

Expected utility versus cumulative prospect theory in an evolutionary model of bargaining

Mining for minerals, while a good source of income to the local economies, results in significant environmental damages. The Aravalli Mountain Range in India protects Delhi and adjoining areas from desertification risks posed by the Thar desert through acting as a physical barrier. However, it has become degraded over time due to persistent illegal mining and encroachment by real estate developers. Restoring the Aravallis will not only reduce the threat of desertification but also help generate valuable ecosystem services, such as water supply, to the nearby cities. Yet restoration efforts undertaken thus far have remained largely unsuccessful due to a lack of sufficient financial incentives. This study asks whether financial incentives for afforestation, such as desertification prevention permits and water-based payments for ecosystem services, can promote restoration of mineral rich commons in the Aravallis. It further seeks to explore the role of risk of restoration failure in discouraging conservation effort amongst communities. We design an incentive structure through which local communities benefit from water and land based payments resulting from restoration. We develop a dynamic optimization model of afforestation decisions in presence of land use change related risk from mining and real estate mafia to derive implications for the long run sustainability of the commons. Results indicate that desertification prevention permits and water payments can be useful towards incentivizing communities to take up protection of the degraded lands. However, when presented with the threat of failure of the restoration project due to illegal mineral extraction, community's optimal afforestation level declines considerably. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Resources Policy

Optimal restoration of common property resources under uncertainty

This paper studies the effects of asymmetric punishment of bribery on both bribery and compliance with regulations. The bribe amount is decided via Nash bargaining and regulatory compliance and whistle-blowing are strategic decisions. Moreover, investigations of bribery and noncompliance occur in a manner that may be interdependent. We show that, under symmetric punishment, inducing whistle-blowing has no effect on the frequency of bribery. When the bribery and noncompliance investigations are independent, a switch from symmetric to asymmetric punishment either makes no difference or induces more nonharassment bribery. Only when bribery detection increases the chance of noncompliance detection and asymmetric punishment leads to whistle-blowing for both types of entrepreneurs, can the shift succeed in reducing noncompliance. The result is robust to the case where legalization of bribe-giving is not feasible for nonharassment bribes. © 2022 The Authors. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Journal of Economics and Management Strategy

Can asymmetric punishment deter endogenous bribery

Using a massive malaria eradication program in India during the 1950s as a natural experiment, we examine the effects of disease environment on child health outcomes and fertility. We harmonise a rich dataset on malaria endemicity with fertility histories of women to exploit the cohort level variation in exposure to the program. We find that the program leads to a significant decline in infant and neonatal mortality and leads to a significant increase in the probability of birth during adolescent years in high malaria endemic regions. We confirm that a fall in the mother’s age at first birth in the post-eradication period drives the fertility response. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Fulltext

Journal of Development Studies

Disease Eradication, Infant Mortality, and Fertility Response: Evidence from Malaria Eradication in India

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where ideologically motivated citizen groups form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties’ seat shares, the size of the rents from holding office and their ideologies. We show that governments may be minimal winning, minority or surplus. Moreover, coalitions may be ‘disconnected’. We then look at how the coalition formation game affects the incentives for party formation. In particular, we show that when the rents from office are low, the median citizen stands unopposed, and when rents are high, there is more political entry. For intermediate rents, we show that strategic dropouts can happen to influence the final policy. We show that the incentives for strategic dropout can be higher under proportional representation than plurality voting, contrary to Duverger’s law. Our model explains the diverse electoral outcomes seen under proportional representation and integrates models of political entry with models of coalitional bargaining. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Games

Party Formation and Coalitional Bargaining in a Model of Proportional Representation

Child malnutrition is remarkably high in India. The problem of food insecurity is also extremely alarming in the country. From a policy perspective, a question of paramount importance in this context is: are these two problems inter-related? Answering this question based on existing literature is difficult. This is because literature examining specifically the effect of food insecurity on child / adolescent malnutrition in India is scarce. Besides, the small number of studies that do examine this question empirically find mixed evidence. In light of this, here we reexamine the effect of food insecurity on child malnutrition using data from the Young Lives survey. Employing several contemporary econometric approaches, we not only estimate the mean effect but also the distributional effects of food insecurity on child malnutrition. We find evidence of sizeable negative average effects of food insecurity on children’s anthropometric indices for nutrition surveillance including weight-for-age z score (WAZ) and height-for-age z-score (HAZ). Further, we document important heterogeneity in the effect of food insecurity on children’s WAZ and HAZ across the outcome-distributions. Our results suggest that expansion of policies that could effectively reduce household food insecurity is vital to address the problem of malnutrition among Indian children. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Hunger and Health: Reexamining the Impact of Household Food Insecurity on Child Malnutrition in India

Exposure to extreme shocks in early life is found to have a lasting impact in adulthood. Exploiting the variation in exposure measured by age and intensity of an earthquake, we evaluate the impact of a 7.7MW earthquake in Gujarat, India, on the health stock of children who were in utero or below three years. Using the India Human Development Survey data from 2004-05 and earthquake intensity data, we find an affected girl child to be shorter by at least 2.5 cm at the age of 3-6 years. The earthquake seems to have destroyed the household infrastructures and health facilities, affecting the expecting mothers and newborn children. The households using services to meet nutritional needs of children and pregnant women seem to be least affected. Our findings recommend faster reconstruction activities and highlight the importance of universal healthcare and nutritional delivery services to mitigate the impacts of early-life shocks. © 2022 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Environment and Development Economics

Lasting impact on health from natural disasters, potential mechanisms andmitigating effects

The focus of the present paper is on the investigation of the deformation and forces of an isolated steel beam column sub-frame exposed to localized fire. The investigated frame is modelled using finite element software ABAQUS considering three dimensional solid elements. A sequentially coupled thermo-mechanical analysis, where the derived temperature distribution obtained from the heat transfer analysis used as an input for the mechanical analysis, is carried out. The input heat flux which acts as Neumann boundary condition for the heat transfer analysis is considered from widely recognized handbook of ‘Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SPFE)’ of fire. Elasto-plastic material model is used for steel where the temperature dependent material properties are followed according to the Eurocode 3. Different cases were investigated based on the location of the localized fire source in the floor below the exposed beam. It was observed that for asymmetrical location of the fire source beneath the beam, the rotation for the far end connection to the fire source was always higher than the near end. © 2022 ISEC Press.

Proceedings of International Structural Engineering and Construction

RESPONSE OF STEEL FRAME ASSEMBLY UNDER LOCALIZED FIRE EFFECT

In this paper, we analyse the education and wage gaps between Hindus and Muslims over the period 1983 to 2011–2012 in India. We find that Muslims are worse off than Hindus in terms of education and this disadvantage has increased over time. Our analysis shows that the wage gap is more pronounced at the higher end of the wage distribution which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. We find that the wage gap has increased over time and the increase is more pronounced at the upper quantiles. Our decomposition analysis shows that difference in education has a significant contribution to the Hindu-Muslim wage gap. We find that the Hindu-Muslim gaps are more pronounced in urban areas relative to rural areas. Comparing Muslims with different Hindu castes, we find that while the disadvantaged castes have improved their condition relative to Muslims over time, the condition of Muslims relative to the advantaged castes has worsened. Dividing the sample into younger (aged 16–35) and older (36–65) cohorts, we find that the Hindu-Muslim gap in education is more acute in the younger cohort while the Hindu-Muslim wage gap is more pronounced for the older cohort. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.