Department of Management Studies

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Introduction of Enterprise Social Media (ESM) in organizations is driven by a need to improve communication and knowledge sharing within the enterprise. Studies show that soon after ESM adoption, there is some initial enthusiasm and subsequently there is a perceptible drop in usage. A review of ESM literature in a morphological framework, with the aim of demystifying the troubling trend, is presented here. Morphological analysis of literature helps exhibit relevant work on ESM in a framework consisting of dimensions and options from which insights can be derived. The framework developed depicts ESM literature through seven dimensions–organizational level factors influencing ESM, unit of analysis, business objectives of ESM adoption, individual level factors influencing ESM, theoretical framework used, outcomes of adoption, and context of ESM implementation. For each of the dimensions, relevant options were explored and listed. Preliminary observation indicates that at an individual level, themes such as absorptive capacity and lurking behavior of individuals need to be studied in the context of ESM. At an organizational level, the impact of human resources (HR) policies on ESM adoption, uses of ESM for internal crowdsourcing need to be evaluated. Practitioners can use these findings to assess and design their ESM strategies and for academicians, the morphological framework reveals the state of current research in the field and identifies gaps for further research in specific areas of ESM. © 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce

A morphological review of enterprise social media literature

A triple-bottom-line (TBL) centric review and assessment of construction practices in India has been conducted using qualitative, inductive content analysis of 68 research papers. The analysis resulted in creation of 13 categories, with 6 categories under social, 4 categories under environmental and 3 categories under economic dimensions. The categories, interpreted in light of an existing sustainable construction framework, revealed wide divergence between the current construction practices in India and those required for sustainable construction under all three dimensions. Using a Concept Map, the complex inter-relationships between various categories are demonstrated and measures required to ensure compliance with sustainable construction principles are highlighted. The concept map also provides multiple propositions that hold significant promise for future research on sustainable construction in India. This study contributes to better understanding of the broader sustainable construction scenario in India and can be used by industry practitioners, researchers as well as policymakers. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

International Journal of Construction Management

Sustainability assessment of construction practices in India using inductive content analysis of research literature

Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 is “to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all”. To measure affordability of accessing clean water, coping cost approach has been adopted, and this paper contributes to the burgeoning empirical literature on measuring affordability. The objective of this paper is to estimate coping costs related to the erratic, unsafe, and inadequate water supply in the metropolitan area of Chennai, India. Based on the data collected from 423 households, we find that households in Chennai city resort to five main types of coping behaviors: collecting, pumping, treating, storing, and purchasing. We employ the multiple regression with robust errors, to estimate the determinants of the coping costs. We obtain the mean coping costs as INR (Indian Rupee) 553, and INR 658 per month for piped and non-piped households in this sample. For non-piped households, collection costs (time costs in traveling and queuing for collecting water) constitute 22% of the coping costs, while collection costs for piped households are less 2% of the coping costs. One interesting finding is the variation of coping costs with household income—these costs are roughly 1% of income for the high income households to as high as 15% for the low income households. The results outline the need of policy intervention to enhance affordability. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Resources, Conservation and Recycling

Measuring affordability of access to clean water: A coping cost approach

This paper explores the use of designed experiments in an online environment. Motivated by real-world examples, we model a scenario where the practitioner is given a finite set of units and needs to select a subset of these which are expended toward a one-shot, multi-factor designed experiment. Following this phase, the designer is left with the remaining set of unused units to implement any learnings from the experiments. With this setting, we answer the key design question of how much to experiment, which translates to choosing the number of replicates for a given design. We construct a Bayesian framework that captures the expected cumulative gain across the entire set of units. We derive theoretical results for the optimal number of replicates for all two-level, full and fractional factorial designs with seven factors or fewer. We conduct simulations that serve as validation of the theoretical results, as well as enabling us to explore scenarios and techniques of analysis that are not captured in the theoretical studies. Our overall results indicate that the optimal allocation of units for experimentation varies from 1 to 20 % of the total units available, which is mainly governed by the experimental environment and the total number of units. We conclude that experimenting with the optimal number of replicates recommended by our study can lead to a cumulative improvement which is 80–95% greater than the expected cumulative improvement gained when a practitioner chooses the number of replicates randomly. © 2019, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

Research in Engineering Design

Optimal replicates for designed experiments under the online framework

This paper proposes that knowledge sharing (KS) decisions taken by firms in supply chains (SCs) are determined by the strategic interactions among the firms, which are, in turn, a function of the product profile and the structural aspects of the SCs. A set of ten parameters that characterise the KS environment in SCs have been identified by synthesising insights from the literature. A conceptual model, integrating the strategic parameters and their interactions with each other, has been developed in the form of an interaction diagram and a concept map. Interesting linkages between (a) knowledge complementarity and SC structure, (b) product profile and KS rates, and (c) knowledge characteristics, knowledge reuse, and SC redesign, all hitherto unreported, have been identified. Future research directions on the role of third-party aggregators as a KS driver are pointed out. © 2019, © Operational Research Society 2019.

Knowledge Management Research and Practice

Strategic parameters of knowledge sharing in supply chains

We consider a bargaining situation between an arriving buyer and a seller, where the buyer and the seller have private valuations. The seller has an inventory, which has to be sold over the infinite horizon. It is assumed that the seller incurs a refusal cost, if the trade does not take place. Myerson (1985) discusses four bilateral bargaining mechanisms in static settings - price negotiation, splitting the difference between seller's and buyer's offer, buyer posted price and seller posted price. The objective of this research is to study these mechanisms in the dynamic setting, with consideration of the refusal cost. In this paper, we model the situation as a Markov decision process, which endogenises the seller's marginal inventory valuation. We find that the seller prefers posting prices when the refusal cost is low. Seller is indifferent between buyer posted price and negotiation for the high refusal cost. © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

International Journal of Operational Research

Optimal bargaining mechanisms with refusal cost

In recent times, signalling quality via queues for generic services has received significant attention. However, the literature till date on primary care services has focussed on the optimal speed-quality trade-off to ensure higher service times and lower waiting times for the patients. Borrowing from the queue management literature on generic services, we aim to understand whether the hypothesis that queue is a signal of physician's quality is reasonable. Based on theoretical arguments, we justify the need to investigate this hypothesis on queue acting as a signal of quality in primary care. Although we conjecture that the queue length on arrival may act as a signal of quality, the waiting experienced after joining the queue is still considered expensive. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fulltext

International Journal of Health Planning and Management

Using queue to signal quality in primary care: The need for further empirical investigation

Exposure to advertisement is considered to be the primary source of indulgence and distraction for children. Past studies have treated children as both empowered and vulnerable. Empowered because after a certain age children become mature enough to understand the difference between entertainment and persuasion, but before reaching that stage children are extremely naïve. This paper aims to explore the changes in childrens’ attitude towards frequent changes in advertising campaigns with reference to a popular product of a famous chocolate multinational brand in India. Four focus groups comprising of 22 children of both the genders between the age group of 8–14 years participated in the study. Selective advertisement from a period of three decades (1983–2016) were chosen and shown to the children in a birthday party and their responses were collected. Congruency Theory of Social Psychology was applied for the analysis of the excerpts. The findings reveals that frequent changes in advertising campaigns create confusion in the minds of the children. The entertainment and empathy towards the advertisement were reduced considerably when the advertisement execution shifted from children to adults. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Journal of Marketing Communications

Attitudinal change in children: An insight from three decade of advertising campaigns in India

A systematic review of literature is a crucial aspect in pursuing any research problem. With the galloping growth in the number of researchers and scientific publications available online in digital libraries, there is information overload which makes the search of relevant papers cumbersome. An efficient academic paper recommendation process could be a promising maneuver for this purpose. The state-of-the-art methods in this domain primarily employ link-based approaches on citation network and do not consider the semantics (context) of papers being recommended, although the later one largely accounts for the relevance of recommendations. Also achieving online response time (scalability) is a perennial desire for any recommendation system. In this context we propose a hybrid approach 'RecCite' that blends the popularity of papers with semantic similarity to acquire relevance. Further, the approach follows a top-down methodology for filtering papers from a more generic and larger network to a community pertaining to a SIG (Special Interest Group) that inherently addresses the scalability aspect. The proposed approach has been systematically evaluated with state-of-the-art baseline method using the publicly available Arnet-Miner data set. Satisfyingly, 'RecCite' outperforms the baseline method with up to 37.66%, 20.14%, and 97.24% improvement in precision, recall, and response time, respectively. © 2019 IEEE.

World University root node

Proceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2019

RecCite: A Hybrid Approach to Recommend Potential Papers

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to transformative service research by drawing on self-determination, elicitation of emotions framework and feelings-as-information theories to explore how customer participation, task-related affective well-being, customer knowledge, task complexity and service outcomes relate with each other. Design/methodology/approach: A synthesis of relevant literature on customer participation and customer well-being reveals a conceptual model with 11 testable propositions. Findings: The conceptual model shows that task-related affective well-being mediates the link between customer participation and service outcomes. Moreover, customer knowledge and task complexity moderate these links. Research limitations/implications: An empirically testable conceptual model models the roles of task-related affective well-being, customer knowledge and task complexity in the process by which customer participation influences service outcomes. Practical implications: Service managers can use the model to design services based on the effects of different types of customer participation on task-related affective well-being. Originality/value: This paper is one of the first to study the mediating role of task-related affective well-being in the relationship between customer participation and service outcomes. It does so by revealing the differential impact various types of participation have on service outcomes and the moderating role of customer knowledge and task complexity. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.