Can we rationally learn to coordinate?

In this paper we examine the issue whether individual rationality considerations are sufficient to guarantee that individuals will learn to coordinate. This question is central in any discussion of whether social phenomena (read: conventions) can be explained in terms of a purely individualistic approach. We argue that the positive answers to this general question that have been obtained in some recent work require assumptions which incorporate some convention. This conclusion may be seen as supporting the viewpoint of institutional individualism in contrast to psychological individualism.     

RFID‐Enabled Visibility and Retail Inventory Record Inaccuracy: Experiments in the Field

Accurate inventory records are key to effective store execution, affecting forecasting, ordering, and replenishment. Prior empirical research, however, shows that retailer inventory records are inherently inaccurate. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enables visibility into the movement of inventories in the supply chain. Using two different field experiments, the current research investigates the effectiveness of this visibility in reducing retail store inventory record inaccuracy (IRI). Study 1 used an interrupted time‐series design and involved daily physical counts of all products in one category in 13 stores (8 treatments and 5 controls) of a major global retailer over 23 weeks. Results indicate a significant decrease in IRI of approximately 26% due to RFID‐enabled visibility. Using an untreated control group design with pre‐test and post‐test, Study 2 expands the number of categories to five and the number of stores to 62 (31 treatment and 31 control stores). Results show that the effectiveness of RFID in reducing IRI varies by category (ranging from no statistically significant improvement to 81%). Results also suggest that RFID ameliorates the effects of known determinants of IRI and provide the key insight that the technology is most effective for product categories characterized by these determinants.     

A general class of non parametric tests for comparing scale parameters

In this paper, a general class of non parametric tests is proposed for the two-sample scale problem. Testing of the scale parameter is very useful in real-life situations commonly faced in engineering, trade, cultivation, industries, medicine, etc. In all these fields, one will prefer the method that gives more consistent results. Thus, it is worthwhile to test the equality of scale parameters. The distribution of the proposed test is established. To assess the performance of the proposed test, the asymptotic efficacies are studied for some underlying distributions and the results are interpreted with useful information. To see the working of the proposed test, an illustrative example for the real-life data set is provided. The simulation study is also carried out to find the asymptotic power of the proposed test. An extension of the general class of tests to the multiple-sample problem is also discussed.     

Do Schooling and Work Empower Women in Developing Countries? Gender and Domestic Decisions in Sri Lanka

Our work challenges and points out the limitations of the theoretical presumptions underlying the relationship between empowerment, education, and employment that have been emphasized in both the exiting literature and the current rhetoric to empower women in developing countries. We use survey, life history, and focus group data to empirically examine the relationship between schooling, paid work, and power in domestic decision making for young, married women in Sri Lanka. We argue that the relationship between education, work, and women's control of household decisions is conditioned by the larger social context, and as such, it is likely to reflect the extent to which the division of labor and access to information and economic resources are the bases of domestic power in the society under consideration. Our results make a strong case for the need to move away from broad-based conceptualizations of women's empowerment to a consideration of the specific arenas and dimensions along which women can have power. In focusing on the domestic arena alone, we find that there are important differences in both the nature and determinants of the financial as opposed to the social and organizational dimension of power in Sri Lankan households. Women who control one of these aspects of family decisions do not necessarily control the other, and while education and employment play an important role in determining women's input in financial decisions, they are largely immaterial in determining household decisions related to social and organizational matters. Our results also demonstrate the importance of going beyong simplistic and limited measures of schooling and work to consider more fundamental structural factors involving family, social, and economic organization.     

Integrated procurement- production system in a just-in-time environment-modelling and analysis

Classically, economic lot size models have been used separately for procurement and production subsystems. However, when the raw materials are used in production, the procurement policies are dependent on the schedule and the batch size for the product. Hence, it is necessary to unify the procurement and production policies. The just-in-time JIT environment provides an ideal setting for such a coordination between the procurement and production policies. The model proposed here is a traditional inventory model recast into a model for a JIT system for a single product, multistage batch environment aiming at the minimization of total variable cost and thereby determining the batch sizes for the product and raw material order sizes. A JIT system aims at minimizing setup time and this feature is captured in the proposed model. The computational experience reported in this paper is based on a number of simulated problem sets. The possible domain of application is also highlighted.     

Keeping up with the Neighbors: Social Interaction in a Market Economy

We consider a world in which individuals have private endowments and trade in markets while their utility is negatively affected by the consumption of their neighbors. Our interest is in understanding how the social structure of comparisons, taken together with the familiar fundamentals of the economy (endowments, technology, and preferences), shapes equilibrium prices, allocations, and welfare. We show that equilibrium prices and consumption are a function of a single network statistic: centrality. An individual's “centrality” is given by the weighted sum of paths of different lengths to all others in a social network. In particular, prices are proportional to the sum of centralities, and an individual's consumption depends on how central she is relative to others in the network. Inequalities in wealth and connections reinforce each other in markets: A transfer of resources from less to more central agents raises prices. As segregated communities become integrated, the poor lose while the rich gain in utility! (JEL: D5, D6, D85)     

Am I allowed to be pregnant? Awareness of pregnancy protection laws among migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, pregnancy is not legal grounds for employers to dismiss their migrant domestic workers (MDWs). However a survey of 589 Filipino and Indonesian MDWs in Hong Kong demonstrates that only a third of respondents know their pregnancy rights. Regression analysis of the survey data highlight the statistically significant positive role of being Filipino and length of tenure in Hong Kong in increasing respondents’ rights awareness. Follow-up conversations reveal that workers understand their rights to be contingent upon the presumed morality of their pregnancy (whether they are married, whether their husband is the father) and their employer’s generosity. These findings reveal the influence of the socio-structural frames migrants carry with them from their home countries, and the ones in which they are embedded in their host destinations, in the lack of purchase of a pregnancy rights discourse among MDWs in Hong Kong. Our findings provide new insight into the power of symbolic violence in women migrant workers’ understanding of their rights, and their emphasis on their ‘work ethics’ over their ‘work rights’.     

Mutiple three-decision procedure for comparing several exponential treatments with the best control

In this paper, the three-decision procedures to classify p treatments as better than or worse than one control, proposed for normal/symmetric probability models [Bohrer, Multiple three-decision rules for parametric signs. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 74 (1979), pp. 432–437; Bohrer et al., Multiple three-decision rules for factorial simple effects: Bonferroni wins again!, J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 76 (1981), pp. 119–124; Liu, A multiple three-decision procedure for comparing several treatments with a control, Austral. J. Statist. 39 (1997), pp. 79–92 and Singh and Mishra, Classifying logistic populations using sample medians, J. Statist. Plann. Inference 137 (2007), pp. 1647–1657]; in the literature, have been extended to asymmetric two-parameter exponential probability models to classify p(p≥1) treatments as better than or worse than the best of q(q≥1) control treatments in terms of location parameters. Critical constants required for the implementation of the proposed procedure are tabulated for some pre-specified values of probability of no misclassification. Power function of the proposed procedure is also defined and a common sample size necessary to guarantee various pre-specified power levels are tabulated. Optimal allocation scheme is also discussed. Finally, the implementation of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through numerical example.     

HYBRID R&D

We develop a model of R&D collaboration in which individual firms carry out in‐house research on core activities and undertake bilateral joint projects on non‐core activities with other firms. We develop conditions on the profit functions of the firm under which R&D investments in different projects of a firm are complementary. We show that this condition is met by standard price and quantity setting oligopoly models. We then study the relation between the number of joint projects and investments and profits. In this context, we identify a second aspect of complementarity: Equilibrium investments in in‐house as well as in each joint project are increasing in the number of projects. However, we find that an increase in number of joint projects of all firms lowers collective profits, suggesting the presence of excessive incentives for conducting research. (JEL: L13, L14, L22, O31, O32)     

Multiple Comparisons with More than One Control for Exponential Location Parameters Under Heteroscedasticity

In this article we present a simple bootstrap method for time series. The proposed method is model-free, and hence it enables us to avoid certain situations where the bootstrap samples may contain impossible values due to resampling from the residuals. The method is easy to implement and can be applied to stationary and nonstationary time series. The simulation results and the application to real time series data show that the method works very well.