Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

About: Indian Institute of Management Bangalore is a education organization based out in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Emerging markets & Corporate governance. The organization has 491 authors who have published 1254 publications receiving 23853 citations. The organization is also known as: IIMB.

Risk aware portfolio construction using deep deterministic policy gradients

Abstract: Allocation of liquid capital to the financial instruments in a portfolio is typically done using a two-step process. In the first step, predictive techniques are used to determine the future risk and rewards for the instrument. In the subsequent step, a quadratic optimization problem is solved to obtain the allocation that maximizes a relevant measure of the portfolio performance computed using a combination of the risks and the rewards. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) eliminates the need for a two step process to find the allocation across the instruments that will optimize a measure of portfolio performance obtained from the market. DRL based portfolio construction autonomously adjusts to a change in the environment unlike traditional machine learning algorithms used in prediction. The existing DRL methods suffer from the challenges of stability, and do not lend themselves well to the portfolio construction problem that has a continuous action space. Proposed in 2015, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG) is a type of actorcritic DRL algorithm that provides support for continuous action space which is encountered in portfolio construction. This paper evaluates the use of DDPG to solve the problem of risk aware portfolio construction. Simulations are done on a portfolio of twenty stocks and the use of both Rate of Return and Sortino ratio as a measure of portfolio performance are evaluated. Results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of DDPG for risk aware portfolio construction. The simulation results presented in this paper show that having a risk-aware measure of portfolio performance such as Sortino ratio give a portfolio with superior return and lower variance.

Who controls the Indian economy: The role of families and communities in the Indian economy

Abstract: Research on the concentration of corporate control frequently highlights the role of a few families, who control large swaths of their economies. The prominent role of certain communities is also evoked in these discussions, but the extent of their influence is unclear. Public and scholarly debate is also divided on the meaning of this kinship-based control; whether it reflects entrenchment or entrepreneurship. This paper examines questions about the extent and meaning of family and community control in the context of India. The results show that three trading communities (the Marwaris, Gujaratis and Parsis) play a disproportionate role in the control and ownership of Indian publicly traded firms. However, their role is skewed towards smaller, younger, and lower market share firms, and there is significant turnover in the identity of the largest firm over time. The results are similar for family control and ownership. Overall, the results do not support the entrenchment perspective, and instead supports the view that these social groups are the primary vehicle for raising funds among smaller, younger, and low market share firms. However, neither do the results support the view that Indian firms are rapidly embracing a managerial model with diffuse shareholdings.

Holistic Rural Marketing

Abstract: Rural Marketing has evolved in India over the years from agricultural marketing with commodity and institutional focus to a more comprehensive three-dimensional perspective of rural to urban, urban...

Studying Unintended Consequences of Using MOOC Interface: an Affordance Perspective to Address the Dropout Problem in MOOCs

Abstract: Governments and policy makers, especially for developing countries are adopting digital means to solve societal problems such as health, education and safety through Transformational Information Technology systems. Such a transformation in the field of education has been brought by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) which aim to empower learners through an online medium of training overcoming physical and financial limitations. However, this large scale intervention is marred by a serious dropout problem. This paper address the dropout problem in MOOCs through improvement in its interface design. I assert that it is imperative to identify the cause of the mismatch between the goals of designer (in terms of his expectations) and that of the participants (in terms of their intentions) for using the MOOC. In this paper, I present affordances as the 'theory of solution' to facilitate bidirectional communication between the instructor and participants through a better design, thus leading to lower dropout rates. I conduct a longitudinal case study to analyze the design and use phases of a MOOC in a premier management institute. Through this work, I plan to contribute towards extending the understanding of the affordance concept in the field of Information Systems by developing an Affordance Perception-Actualization-Assessment process model. This work has strong policy implications in identifying and correcting the causes of high dropout rates among learners using MOOCs.