Determinants of Individual Giving Behavior in Urban India

This paper, based on a primary sample survey over 1925 earning individuals in the cities of Kolkata, Cuttack and Bengaluru, examines how the individual and household characteristics influence the acts of giving in urban India. The regression results indicate income, family size and property ownership affecting likelihood and extent of giving. Likelihood to give is more with females, though males tend to donate more. There exists threshold income beyond which likelihood to donate is less. Characteristics like age, education, dependency ratio and marital status influence certain acts of giving. As the opportunity cost of non-cash giving increases with the rise in income, cash donations substitute non-cash giving. There also prevails complementarity in the acts of giving. On behavioral front, in addition to work–life balance and pledging, the notion of rational choice seems to be gaining ground.

     

On kernel density estimation based on different stratified sampling with optimal allocation

Kernel density estimation is probably the most widely used non parametric statistical method for estimating probability densities. In this paper, we investigate the performance of kernel density estimator based on stratified simple and ranked set sampling. Some asymptotic properties of kernel estimator are established under both sampling schemes. Simulation studies are designed to examine the performance of the proposed estimators under varying distributional assumptions. These findings are also illustrated with the help of a dataset on bilirubin levels in babies in a neonatal intensive care unit.     

BARGAINING WITH SHARED INFORMATION*

This paper formulates and analyzes models of two-party bargaining behavior where each side possesses private information about its preferences that is unavailable to the other. We examine the strategic behavior that bargainers might exhibit when disclosing information either to an arbitrator or to each other. Our results show that when bargaining is over one issue, it is relatively uncomplicated analytically to calculate the optimal strategy, but, despite this, even sophisticated bargainers tend to make wrong assumptions about the behavior of others and to use strategies that are far from optimal. When the bargaining encompasses several factors, computation of optimal strategies becomes very cumbersome and the use of an optimal strategy does not gain a bargainer much over what he could have achieved with truthful revelation. Thus, in theory, truthful revelation is not the best course of action to adopt for a bargainer interested in maximizing individual gain, but in practice the alternatives may involve mistaken assumptions about the behavior of others and may therefore turn out to be inferior to truthful revelation.     

Multiperson Bargaining and Strategic Complexity

We investigate the effect of introducing costs of complexity in the n‐person unanimity bargaining game. As is well‐known, in this game every individually rational allocation is sustainable as a Nash equilibrium (also as a subgame perfect equilibrium if players are sufficiently patient and if n & 2). Moreover, delays in agreement are also possible in such equilibria. By limiting ourselves to a plausible notion of complexity that captures length of memory, we find that the introduction of complexity costs (lexicographically with the standard payoffs) does not reduce the range of possible allocations but does limit the amount of delay that can occur in any agreement. In particular, we show that in any n‐player game, for any allocation z, an agreement on z at any period t can be sustained as a Nash equilibrium of the game with complexity costs if and only if t≤n. We use the limit on delay result to establish that, in equilibrium, the strategies implement stationary behavior. Finally, we also show that ‘noisy Nash equilibrium’ with complexity costs sustains only the unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium allocation.     

Empirical Performance of Cross-Validation With Oracle Methods in a Genomics Context

When employing model selection methods with oracle properties such as the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) and the Adaptive Lasso, it is typical to estimate the smoothing parameter by m-fold cross-validation, for example, m = 10. In problems where the true regression function is sparse and the signals large, such cross-validation typically works well. However, in regression modeling of genomic studies involving Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP), the true regression functions, while thought to be sparse, do not have large signals. We demonstrate empirically that in such problems, the number of selected variables using SCAD and the Adaptive Lasso, with 10-fold cross-validation, is a random variable that has considerable and surprising variation. Similar remarks apply to non-oracle methods such as the Lasso. Our study strongly questions the suitability of performing only a single run of m-fold cross-validation with any oracle method, and not just the SCAD and Adaptive Lasso.     

Classification with multiple independent measurements under a separate sampling scheme

In this article, we consider the problem of classifying m independent repeated (multiple) observations coming from the same population under a separate sampling scheme. We derive the asymptotic risk of the proposed NN type classification rule and obtain the upper and lower bounds for it in specific cases in terms of Bayes risk. Using a Monte Carlo simulation study we show that, as m increases, the classification risk decreases.     

An Empire of Drink: Gender, Labor and the Historical Economies of Alcohol

Abstract This article examines the colonial and post-colonial histories of gender, labor and alcohol production and consumption in the tea plantations of North Bengal, India. It argues that the symbolic and metaphoric constructions of primitivism within a - wider imperial narrative provides one backdrop for an exploration of the symbolic and material histories of labor and alcohol politics in the plantation. The essay moves between different historical periods and languages, highlighting the interconnections between the semantic and bodily practices, which continue to index the gendered and racialized labor politics of contemporary tea plantations. It ends with a contemporary ethnographic examination of women's protest around the "liquor business" in the postcolonial plantation.     

ActionAid's Young Urban Women programme in urban India: taking an intersectional approach to decent work,unpaid care,and sexual and reproductive health and rights

This article traces the implementation of a programme with young urban women living in poverty in the Indian cities of Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. This programme aims to increase their economic independence and control over their bodies. It begins from an intersectional analysis of women's access to decent work, their unpaid care work responsibilities, and their sexual and reproductive health and rights. It is part of a multi-country ActionAid intervention, Young Urban Women (YUW). The article looks at some of the strategies used in the programme, identifies successes and challenges, and offers insights for others working with young women in urban areas.