Soumyen Sikdar

The choice of organizational form in strategic contexts

Abstract This paper analyses the choice of organizational forms in strategic contexts. A simple duopoly model is considered where a capitalistic firm interacts with a firm in which decisions are reached via bargaining between workers and owner-managers. It is shown that various factors like the bargaining power of workers, their attitudes towards risk, the sequence of moves etc. can influence the choice of organizational form.

A game theoretic analysis of multichannel retail in the context of “showrooming”

Showrooming as a market phenomenon in multichannel retailing has grown in importance over the last few years. Consumers nowadays use the brick-and-mortar store to research about a product before purchasing it online. This leads to the offline stores being converted into showrooms for the online retailers. Therefore, popular notion suggests that showrooming should benefit the online retailer. In this paper, our objective is to analyze multichannel retailing under showrooming and determine the veracity of the popularly held belief. We develop a series of game theoretic models that involve a traditional retailer and an online retailer under showrooming. We determine optimal pricing strategies for each player and also the sales effort expended by the traditional retailer based on the interplay of power dynamics, market potential and the impact of showrooming. Our results indicate that profit for the traditional as well as the online retailer decreases with rising levels of showrooming. Hence, high levels of showrooming are not beneficial from the perspective of the online retailer. Thus, contrary to popular intuition, lessening of showrooming benefits not only the traditional retailer but also the online retailer. Nevertheless, from the consumers point of view showrooming is beneficial as it leads to overall reduction in retail prices. We also analyze the viability of a click-and-mortar model as a strategy of the traditional retailer to counter the threat of showrooming. We analyze multi-channel retailing under showrooming in a game theoretic set up.We study the impact of showrooming on the traditional as well as the online retailer.We study the interaction of market potential and power dynamics with showrooming.We develop a strategy matrix for pricing decisions under showrooming.

Telecommunications Industry in the Era of Globalization with Special Reference to India

Globalization opens up possibilities for gains in efficiency through international exchange based on the principle of comparative advantage. These gains are very significantly augmented with the development of communications system that reduces cost of negotiations, monitoring, and coordination. The advent of telegraph as a communication device in 1839 in Britain marked a signal change in this scenario of cost of communication.

Occupation choices of high school and college students with special reference to teaching and research

As Indias higher education sector is poised to grow at a tremendous pace, one of its main challenges would be provision of quality education. Teacher quality has been identified as one of the most critical factors affecting educational quality. As such, the immense importance of attracting high-quality entrants into the teaching profession cannot be overemphasized. In India there is a rising concern shared by many, especially in academia, that nowadays relatively meritorious students are mostly unwilling to consider teaching and research as possible career options. While evidence from other countries indicates that teaching, a relatively low paying occupation, may be a poor career choice, the literature on this area is sparse in the case of India. This paper addresses precisely this issue as it studies how students, who are prospective labour market entrants, perceive teaching as a profession relative to other available career options. Our analysis, based on a sample survey carried out among high school and college students from Delhi and Kolkata, suggests that for the majority of students surveyed, teaching is not a ‘first-best’ or ‘most preferred’ career option. Further, in their view, rather than raising salaries, it is more important to bring about changes in the nature of the teachers job, to make this a more attractive career option.

Capital Inflow into Developing Economies: A Macroeconomic Study

External capital inflow on a massive scale into the emerging market economies is a very significant phenomenon of recent years. Making distinctions between direct investment, real and financial, and portfolio investment and incorporating crowding in or crowding out effects we derive some results about the impact of higher inflow on output, investment and the exchange rare. A formula is suggested for estimating the cost of central bank intervention.

Mundell-Fleming with Stock Market and Endogenous Risk Premium

In the textbook Mundell-Fleming analysis of an open economy in the short run interest bearing bonds are the only assets and expectation about exchange rate movements is usually taken to be static. This is not a good description of the Indian economy where capital inflow in recent years has predominantly taken the form of portfolio investment in stocks and it is driven very strongly by expectations of capital gains. The present exercise is a reformulation that departs from the standard model by replacing (a) the home bond by home stock and (b) static expectations by regressive (stabilizing) expectations. Country risk is captured in the standard model through the introduction of risk premium which is taken as an exogenous parameter. We have made the risk premium endogenous by making it dependent on the country’s current account deficit and the government’s budget deficit. These modifications produce some new results that do not hold in the textbook version.

Timing of decisions and the competitive firm under input price uncertainty

Abstract This paper studies the behavior of a competitive firm faced with input price uncertainty when the ex ante decision variable is output, not the quantities of the inputs. Highly unconventional results are obtained about the effects of uncertainty and of marginal increases in risk.