The two-dimensional estimation problem of the arbitrage-free option price surface from available best bid-ask quotes is difficult to solve due to insufficient as well as skewed quotes for various strikes and maturities besides the prevalence of arbitrage opportunities in the observed quotes. This article presents a semi-closed form approximation for constructing an arbitrage-free European call option price surface from the observed quotes. The estimated option pricing surface is represented as an interpolation-based convex combination of shape-restricted Bernstein polynomials. A fast and straightforward surface-fitting algorithm is presented based on the quadratic programming method. This research also includes a simulation utilizing the Heston stochastic volatility model to evaluate the proposed method. The empirical applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated using S&P 500 call option price data. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Research and practice emphasize the criticality of supply chain agility in responding to external disruptions. However, many organizations struggled to respond at enhanced speed to the global supply chain shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations need hyperagile supply chains to survive and remain competitive in an environment characterized by unexpected and sudden disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that supply chain hyperagility (SCH) is a distinctive organization-specific capability. It enables organizations to effectively manage demand shocks at extreme speeds and under extreme time pressures. We advance the concept of supply chain hyperagility and establish its antecedents, taking the dynamic capability perspective. This study operationalizes the SCH construct for the first time and investigates its antecedents using structural equation modeling. The results highlight the significance of data analytical capabilities, market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, and supply chain integration in shaping supply chain hyperagility. The study offers practical insights for managers regarding designing supply chains that can navigate hyperagile environments and benefit from the opportunities presented by such environments. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Africa is rising, but IB scholars have largely failed to take notice. We argue that this is a missed opportunity. Not only is Africa a dynamic and distinctive region, but its rise presents a number of puzzles for international business (IB) research, with phenomena that seem to challenge fundamental assumptions underlying IB theories. In order to unravel these puzzles and better explain business dynamics on the continent, we contend that there is a need for IB theorizing to place greater emphasis on the role of people, to balance IB’s traditional emphasis on institutions, location-specific assets, and other macro-level attributes. We explore how this conceptual shift presents new avenues for inquiry into issues that are of importance for IB but have received limited attention to date. Such issues include entrepreneurial human capital, social networks, institutional co-evolution, and the informal economy. As such, we argue that, while extant theories in IB inform explanations and predictions regarding business activity across the continent, Africa’s diverse and distinctive characteristics offer the potential to serve as a context for testing and developing generalizable, cutting-edge IB theory. © 2022, Academy of International Business.

A considerable body of research on inequality in India has focused on consumption inequality. This article compares inequality in consumption expenditure and income, using two waves of the India Human Development Survey. We find that while income inequality increased marginally, expenditure inequality remained stable. The article also undertakes the decomposition of income inequality by sources and finds that wage and agricultural incomes contribute most to inequality in rural areas whereas wage and business incomes are the major contributors in urban areas. Wages and government transfers arse found to be inequality-decreasing sources of income, and agricultural income is found to be inequality-increasing. While government transfers benefit low-income households, there is potential for increasing their efficacy and for attaining a more egalitarian distribution of income by better targeting. Further, we examine how expenditure and income are associated with the ownership of household assets. Our findings suggest that low consumption is a better indicator of material well-being than low income. © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Despite the purported benefits of blockchain technology for business applications, it is unclear how blockchain adoption affects firm performance, and large-scale empirical evidence on this relationship remains scarce. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, we examine the relationship between blockchain adoption and firm performance using a sample of 4994 firm-year observations from 2017 to 2021. Using a dynamic System GMM approach, we show that blockchain adoption significantly increases Tobin's Q (a market-based measure of expected future earnings); however, it has no relation with the current accounting performance measured using return on equity (ROE) and return on assets (ROA). We find that a firm's intangible capital and environmental dynamism positively moderate the relationship between blockchain adoption and Tobin's Q. The former finding reflects market expectations that firms with high intangible capital are better equipped to benefit from blockchain adoption. The latter finding suggests that blockchain adoption strengthens firms' dynamic capabilities, and thus it enables firms to undertake proactive and innovative initiatives in response to an uncertain business environment. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

In this article, we have explored a GeoX/G/1 model with Bernoulli feedback wherein the clients that enter and find the system to be busy, halt for a while prior to attempting again to enter the system. The server is erratic and can take utmost J-vacations regularly unless one client appears in the virtual track (orbit) again on returning from vacation. Also, the server is sent for repair on an urgent basis as soon as it breaks down. Using the probability generating function technique, the system size distribution of the server during busy, breakdown, vacation state and orbit size along with some performance measures have been derived. These derived quotients are then visualised and validated with the help of tables and graphs. Further, the cost analysis of the model is carried out and the optimal cost for the system is obtained. We have used direct search method, particle swarm optimisation (PSO), artificial bee colony (ABC) and cuckoo search (CS) techniques for the comparative study and presented the graphs for the convergence of these techniques. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Using the ‘Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code’ (IBC) in India, we show that, despite an increase in the supply of credit, IBC led to a higher reduction in the secured debt of the high tangibility firms compared to the low tangibility firms. We also find that secured debt was substituted with other sources like equity, retained earnings, and accounts payable; more cash was held back. Our findings suggest that managers’ expected cost of bankruptcy obstructed the expected increase in supply of credit after IBC. We add to the mixed evidence on the impact of creditor rights on firm's financing decisions. © 2023

Earnings management literature considers high disclosure complexity as indicative of obfuscation. We argue that this singular focus on disclosure complexity can be misleading as managers adopt other obfuscation strategies too to conceal earnings management. We examine several alternative obfuscation strategies using a sample of 67,649 management discussion and analysis (MD&A) disclosures of US firms from 1994 to 2020. We find that managers obfuscate not only by increasing the disclosure complexity but also by omitting negative information, reducing information content, and projecting confidence about the state of the business. Robustness tests suggest that our findings are robust to potential endogeneity concerns. © 2022

Purpose: Many studies have shown that from a theoretical and empirical point of view, downside risk-based measures of risk are better than the traditional ones. Despite academic appeal and practical implications, downside risk has not been thoroughly examined in markets outside developed country markets. Using downside beta as a measure of downside risk, this study examines the relationship between downside beta and stock returns in Indian equity market, an emerging market with unique investor, asset and market characteristics. Design/methodology/approach: This is an empirical study done by using ranked portfolio return analysis and regression analysis methodologies. Findings: The study results show that downside risk, as measured by downside beta, is distinctly priced in the Indian equity market. There is a direct positive relationship between downside beta and contemporaneous realized returns, indicating a premium for downside risk. Downside risk carries a higher weightage than upside potential in the aggregate return of the stock portfolios. Downside beta is a better measure of systematic risk than conventional market beta and downside coskewness. Practical implications: The empirical results support the adoption of downside beta in practice and provide a case for replacing traditional beta with downside beta in asset pricing applications, trading and investment strategies, and capital allocation decision-making. Originality/value: This is one of the first in-depth studies examining downside beta in Indian equity markets using a broad sample of individual stock returns covering a wide time range of 22 years. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to compare downside beta and downside coskewness using individual stock data from the Indian equity market. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: The objective of our study is to understand the factors associated with non-adherence to the physician’s follow-up advice by persons with glaucoma. Methods: We use a four-year panel dataset containing demographic, clinical, and intervention details and doctor’s advised follow-up date for a random sample of 2,622 glaucoma patients from an Indian tertiary eye care hospital. We model this unique “advised follow-up date” in multivariate logistic regressions to identify factors associated with patients’ coming early or late as against on-time. An OLS regression also examines an association between delayed follow-up and declining visual acuity. Results: Demographic variables such as age, gender, distance to hospital, IOP, and visual acuity were not associated with delayed adherence to follow-up. Patients advised to review within 2 months (p <.001), paying patients (p <.001), and those habituated to routine follow-up (diabetes patients) (p <.01) are less likely to delay care-seeking. Patients are more likely to come on-time in visits immediately after clinical interventions relative to later ones (p <.001). Our second analysis reveals the presence of cataract and the very first post-surgery visit as factors influencing patients to come early. Our third analysis reveals that a higher proportion of delayed visits had resulted in worsening of vision in the glaucoma-affected eye. Conclusion: Our results suggest that active counselling by doctors, especially for routine follow-up visits, can help in better follow-up adherence and prevention of glaucoma-related visual impairment. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Extensive literature argues that crowds possess essential collective intelligence benefits that allow superior decision-making by untrained individuals working in low-information environments. Classic wisdom of crowds theory is based on evidence gathered from studying large groups of diverse and independent decision-makers. Yet, most human decisions are reached in online settings of interconnected like-minded people that challenge these criteria. This observation raises a key question: Are there surprising expressions of collective intelligence online? Here, we explore whether crowds furnish collective intelligence benefits in crowdfunding systems. Crowdfunding has grown and diversified quickly over the past decade, expanding from funding aspirant creative works and supplying pro-social donations to enabling large citizen-funded urban projects and providing commercial interest-based unsecured loans. Using nearly 10 million loan contributions from a market-dominant lending platform, we find evidence for collective intelligence indicators in crowdfunding. Our results, which are based on a two-stage Heckman selection model, indicate that opinion diversity and the speed at which funds are contributed predict who gets funded and who repays, even after accounting for traditional measures of creditworthiness. Moreover, crowds work consistently well in correctly assessing the outcome of high-risk projects. Finally, diversity and speed serve as early warning signals when inferring fundraising based solely on the initial part of the campaign. Our findings broaden the field of crowd-aware system design and inform discussions about the augmentation of traditional financing systems with tech innovations. © 2023 ACM.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have become a popular concept within research and practitioner contexts. Yet, while both literature streams have produced relevant eco-factors, no clear empirical evidence has emerged on their impact. This study addresses the following question: in impoverished areas, to what extent does the business ecosystem reduce gender differences in entrepreneurial success (controlling ownership and business longevity)? Our framework distinguishes three levels—cultural, social, and material—in the four major regions of the Indian ecosystem. Our results show that family support is most important in reducing the gender gap in the success of entrepreneurs. We establish the importance of social network support. We find no evidence that capital funding influences the gender gap in entrepreneurial success. Last, our study suggests that the more female entrepreneurs are exposed to local markets at the beginning of their enterprise, the more entrepreneurially successful they are than male entrepreneurs. Implications are discussed. © 2022

Applying machine learning tools to human activity analysis presents two major challenges: Firstly, the transformation of actions into multiple attributes increases training and testing time significantly. Secondly, the presence of noises and outliers in the dataset adds complexity and makes it difficult to implement the activity detection system efficiently. This paper addresses both of the challenges by proposing a kernel fuzzy proximal support vector machine as a robust classifier for multicategory classification problems. It transforms the input patterns into a higher-dimensional space and assigns each pattern an appropriate membership degree to reduce the effect of noises and outliers. The proposed method only requires the solution of a set of linear equations to obtain the classifiers; thus, it is computationally efficient. The computer simulation results on ten UCI benchmark problems show that the proposed method outperforms established methods in predictive accuracy. Finally, numerical results from three human activity recognition problems validate the applicability of the proposed method. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

Coherent systems are widely studied in reliability experiments. Under the assumption that the components of a coherent system follow a two-parameter Weibull distribution, maximum likelihood inference for n-component coherent systems with known signatures under a simple step-stress model is discussed in this paper. The detailed steps of the stochastic expectation maximization algorithm under this setup are also developed to obtain estimates of the model parameters. Asymptotic confidence intervals for the model parameters are constructed using the observed Fisher information matrix and missing information principle. Parametric bootstrap approach is used also to construct confidence intervals for the parameters. A method based on best linear unbiased estimators is developed to provide initial values that are needed for numerical computation of maximum likelihood estimates. The performance of the methods developed is assessed through an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study. Finally, two numerical examples are presented for illustrative purpose. © 2023, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

This introductory chapter reflects on postcolonial feminism, its origin, development, and critique by drawing on the writings of foundational women writers. The chapter demonstrates how postcolonial feminism is advanced in this book. It makes a case for postcolonial feminism within the management and organization studies (MOS) and, with it, the need for thinking and acting that is more inclusive of and sensitive to the cultural and historical tensions arising from patriarchy and other social inequalities that continue to flow from colonialism. Focusing on the postcolonial contexts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates how postcolonial feminism enriches our understanding of the politics of knowledge production from these contexts in MOS. It concludes by discussing the roadmap for this book via the three themes, namely, feminist resistance to subalternity: deconstructing “development” and “social responsibility,” exposing neocolonialism in the post colonies: an urge for ethics of care, and decolonizing management education and praxis through postcolonial feminism. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Vijayta Doshi; individual chapters, the contributors.

This introduction to the special issue maps the extant research on managing crossborder knowledge for innovation and classifies it into four clusters: knowledge spillovers and location, international alliances and R&D networks, knowledge transfer and absorptive capacity, and learning organization and capabilities. The eleven articles that compose the special issue are introduced, and a future agenda for international business research is proposed. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Negative ties and gender (as a contextual variable) have remained under-studied in the social networks research in management. Drawing on occupational gender-typing theory, the paper hypothesizes that the relationship between indegree centrality of employees in a positive ties-based network and their tendency to cite their colleagues in negative ties differs in a feminine and a masculine occupation. Using network data from two organizations in India, the paper shows that in a feminine occupation (nursing), the higher the indegree centrality of the employees in a positive ties-based network, the less likely are they to cite negative ties whereas, in a masculine occupation (mining), the higher the indegree centrality of the employees in a positive ties-based network, more likely are they to cite negative ties. We make a theoretical contribution by extending the occupational gender-typing theory in social networks research by theorizing and examining the distinctive effects of the context – feminine and masculine occupations – on networks and work relations. We also discuss the managerial implications of the study. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

The term feminism is often treated as a stable and universalizing politics and practice. For postcolonial feminism, the issues of interest are not only social and cultural inequalities in terms of caste, class, color, ethnicity, gender, and religion, but also historical, political, and geographical inequalities in terms of Third World, Global South and remnants of the colonial past Postcolonial feminism pays nuanced attention to historical diversity and local specificity of feminist issues. This book draws upon the work grounded specifically in the context of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to demonstrate the plurality of thinking. In mainstream management and organization studies, context is often understood as a present, static field. This book discusses how context is an important consideration for any management and organization study and for feminist studies in management and organization studies. It informs the way we need to understand context not just as present but also as past. Postcolonial feminism highlights the historical roots and past privileges of a context that often gets overlooked in management and organization studies where context is mostly understood in the present. This book highlights the contributions of women writers, poets, and activists such as Christina Stringer, Elena Samonova, Gayatri Spivak, Mary Douglas, Naila Kabeer, and Uzma Falak to postcolonial feminism in management and organization studies. Each of these women has engaged with writing that has the potential to enrich and transform understanding of postcolonial feminism in management and organization studies, making this book a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and advanced students. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Vijayta Doshi; individual chapters, the contributors.

To what extent has chronic poverty increased during the pandemic? In July and August 2021, we revisited seven villages of southern Rajasthan (India), where we had studied household poverty dynamics in 2002. We find that in the two decades before the pandemic (2002–2020), people’s structural positions improved vastly, chronic poverty fell from nearly half to less than 20% of households. These gains in resilience helped people cope with the pandemic. The majority suffered deep income losses between February 2020 and August 2021, but there is no evidence of any substantive rise in chronic poverty. © 2023 Oxford Department of International Development.

We examine the impact of an extreme monetary shock, India's demonetization of 2016, on domestic agricultural trade. Using data from around 3000 regulated markets for 35 major crops, we find that trade value fell by 16.3–16.8% in the short run, settling at 11.8–12.1% after eight months, driven primarily by a decline in prices. Triple difference estimates suggest sharpest impacts for kharif crops, perishables and crops with minimal government intervention. Markets far away from banks fared worse. Our results suggest that the implosion of value of agricultural trade domestically persisted two growing seasons beyond the one that coincided with the shock, whereas existing findings suggest that the negative impact on the economy as a whole dissipates in that time. © 2022 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.