The Organization of Supplier Networks: Effects of Delegation and Intermediation

In a one‐principal two‐agent model with adverse selection and collusion among agents, we show that delegating to one agent the right to subcontract with the other agent always earns lower profit for the principal compared with centralized contracting. Delegation to an intermediary is also not in the principal's interest if the agents supply substitutes. It can be beneficial if the agents produce complements and the intermediary is well informed.     

The Distributive Impact of Reforms in Credit Enforcement: Evidence From Indian Debt Recovery Tribunals

It is generally presumed that stronger legal enforcement of lender rights increases credit access for all borrowers because it expands the set of incentive compatible loan contracts. This result relies on an assumption that the supply of credit is infinitely elastic. In contrast, with inelastic supply, stronger enforcement generates general equilibrium effects that may reduce credit access for small borrowers and expand it for wealthy borrowers. In a firm‐level panel, we find evidence that an Indian judicial reform that increased banks' ability to recover nonperforming loans had such an adverse distributive impact.     

Aspirations,Segregation, and Occupational Choice

This paper examines the steady states of an overlapping generations economy with a given distribution of household locations over a one‐dimensional interval. Parents decide whether or not to educate their children. Educational decisions are affected by location: There are local complementarities in investment incentives stemming from aspirations formation, learning spillovers, or local public goods. At the same time, economy‐wide wages endogenously adjust to bring factor supplies into line with demand. The model therefore combines local social interaction with global market interaction. The paper studies steady‐state configurations of skill acquisition, both with and without segregation. The model is used to compare macroeconomic and welfare properties of segregated and unsegregated steady states. (JEL: D31, O15, D85)     

Introduction: Self in South Asia

The so called western, rational, individual, autonomous, self marked by freedom, potential and choice and deemed essential for modernity has predominantly been juxtaposed with the presumed collective, static, bounded, “identity” of the “non-west” and its inhabitants. Anthropological scholarship has thus been marked by its focus on the “identity” of its subjects (drawn from a collective and shared with others) instead of a self. Nowhere has this theorisation between the self and the collective been so fraughtly interrogated as in the Anthropology of South Asia. A common place occurrence in academic, policy and everyday discussions, South Asian personhood has been comprehended only through various collective categories like gender, kinship, religion, caste, community following the Dumontian holism that there are no individuals and only caste and hierarchy in India. The discussions of self have also remained understudied in historiography inspite of being intrinsic to the Indian post-colonial public life. Recently, historians have turned to individual sensibilities and life stories while others have argued that the self is a product of history transformed in a public debate. It is important to reflect on the methodological connotations of using such person-centred self-representations – narratives, novels, biographies and memoirs – which are often deemed to be inadequate sources of anthropological and ethnographic value. Theoretically and methodologically these articles on self in South Asia distinctly depart from the existing anthropological and historical literature by bringing together at the same juncture both synchronic and diachronic accounts in conjunction with psychic and social histories. In this volume we are interested in the practices and conceptual tools behind the self than a definition. The focus here is on the ethnographic examination of the self and personal experience, of the minutae of the interactions of daily life, on the dialogical characters of the self in South Asia rather than a “South Asian” self. The idea of the self becomes particularly pertinent within the shifting contexts of economic liberalization, migration, violent conflicts, consumerism, new media and the role of transnationally affiliated groups in challenging/reifying static, orientalised and essentialising accounts of the self.     

Pricing,Allocation, and Overbooking in Dynamic Service Network Competition When Demand Is Uncertain

We study the problem of combined pricing, resource allocation, and overbooking by service providers involved in dynamic noncooperative oligopolistic competition on a network that represents the relationships of the providers to one another and to their customers when service demand is uncertain. We propose, analyze, and compute solutions for a model that is more general than other models reported in the revenue management literature to date. In particular, previous models typically consider only three or four of five key revenue management features that we have purposely built into our model: (1) pricing, (2) resource allocation, (3) dynamic competition, (4) an explicit network, and (5) uncertain demand. Illustrative realizations of the abstract problem we study are those of airline revenue management and service provision by companies facing resource constraints. Under fairly general regularity conditions, we prove existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium for dynamic oligopolistic service network competition described by our model. We also show, for an appropriate notion of regularity, that competition leads to the underpricing of network services, a finding numerically illustrated by an example of intermediate size. Our proposed algorithm can be implemented using well‐known off‐the‐shelf commercial software.