It is my pleasure to present the third issue of the year, with its complement of articles and features. In this issue, we carry six full papers, along with the feature article and the book review. This issue also contains a notification of the tenth IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC) scheduled on January 4th and 5th, 2019. I look forward to your participation in IMRDC 2019.
In this issue, we have two papers dealing with the subject of customer loyalty – an important aspect for businesses.
In “Navigating from Programme Loyalty to Company Loyalty”, Seema Gupta, Tanvi Gupta and G. Shainesh examine the link between loyalty programmes and company loyalty and identify three processes that mediate between program loyalty and company loyalty.
The paper, “Mechanics of Engendering Customer Loyalty: A Conceptual Framework”, by Medha Srivastava and Alok Kr Rai, carries out a qualitative review of the concept of customer loyalty and suggests the mechanics of engendering customer loyalty through the dynamics of customer satisfaction and emotional attachment, the factors primarily responsible for promoting customer loyalty. A high degree of customer satisfaction, coupled with the customer’s emotional attachment, the article concludes, forges an enduring association between the company and its customers, which transforms into a loyal relationship.
The Indian capital market has seen a huge increase in household savings being channeled to the market through mutual funds. However, investors must evaluate the performance of various mutual funds to create the most effective asset mix. In their paper, “Style-Exposure Analysis of Large-Cap Equity Mutual Funds in India,” Debaditya Mohanti and P. K. Priyan evaluate the performance of the top five large-cap equity funds of different mutual fund agencies in India, in terms of consistency in the investment style and the stock selection capability of the fund managers using the Return-Based Style Analysis (RBSA) approach proposed by Sharpe (1992). The study finds that the fund managers exhibit some level of active management rather than passively tracking the style benchmarks and demonstrate good selection capability.
While human capital is recognised as central to a firm’s competitiveness and performance, the underlying dimensions binding human capital to competitive performance have not been fully developed. In their paper, “Dimensions of Human Capital and Firm Performance: Micro-Firm Context”, Eijaz Ahmed Khan and Mohammed Quaddus identify and design a measurement model for human capital dimensions, in the context of micro-firms in Bangladesh. Based on literature on the resource-based view and dynamic capability view of firms, the paper presents several direct relationships: demographic factor to firm performance, psychographic factor to firm performance, demographic factor to psychographic factor. The article also shows the mediating role of psychographic factor between the demographic factor and firm performance.
Yamini Srinivasan and Rahul Ratnakar Marathe approach the planning fallacy, which is the tendency to underestimate the duration of a task due to the optimistic bias of individuals, in their paper, “Mathematical Model to Mitigate Planning Fallacy and to Determine Realistic Delivery Time”. They focus on the planning fallacy in lead time/completion time estimation in a manufacturing supply chain and develop a mathematical model involving an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), a contract manufacturer (CM) and a supplier to avoid the mis-estimation of completion time and control the failure rate of project/task time.
In developing countries, there is a tendency among farmers to be risk-averse in their resource allocation decisions, and to the adoption of innovations. In their paper, “Anomaly in Decision Making Under Risk: Violation of Stochastic Dominance among Farmers in Gujarat, India,” Thiagu Ranganathan, Sarthak Gaurav, and Ashish Singh investigate farmers’ decision making under risk by eliciting their willingness to pay for hypothetical risky income distributions. Their study finds that majority of farmers seemed to violate the conditions put forth by First Order Stochastic Dominance, where, according to the authors, there might be a role of background risk, pessimism, and transfer of attention to some income outcomes. The study also finds that framing of income risk as a price or yield risk mattered in farmers’ behaviour under risk suggesting that farmer responses to innovations that affect the yield distributions might be different from market restructuring innovations that may alter the price distributions. The research yields policy implications particularly with respect to diffusion of newer technology and financial risk management products.
The agri-food supply chain which covers the chain of activities from production on the farm to processing, distribution, and retailing to the consumer, plays an important role in providing producers access to markets. The Round Table article by Gopal Naik and D. N. Suresh discusses the “Challenges of Creating Sustainable Agri-Retail Supply Chains” which include the transformation of agri-food supply chains into globally interconnected systems of complex relationships, increasing urbanisation and changing consumer consumption patterns, and the growing pressure on businesses and governments to pay more attention to the environmental and resource consequences of the ever-increasing production, distribution and consumption of agro-based products. The article discusses policy initiatives and measures taken by the Government of India to meet these challenges, and the need to involve corporates in these efforts. The article includes a discussion of these issues by a panel of stakeholders.
In the book review section, we have a review of “Macroeconomics and Markets in Developing and Emerging Economies,” by Ashima Goyal, published by Routledge India. The book review has been contributed by Shahana Mukherjee.
Best wishes,
Ashok Thampy
Editor-in-Chief
IIMB Management Review
India
Email address: eic@iimb.ac.in
