Indian Institute of Management Calcutta

About: Indian Institute of Management Calcutta is a education organization based out in Kolkata, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supply chain & Emerging markets. The organization has 415 authors who have published 1354 publications receiving 21725 citations. The organization is also known as: IIMC & IIM Calcutta.

Follow the herd or be myself? An analysis of consistency in behavior of reviewers and helpfulness of their reviews

Abstract: This study investigates if reviewers' pattern of rating is consistent over time and predictable. Two interesting results emerge from the econometric analyses using publicly available data from TripAdvisor.com . First, reviewers' rating behavior is consistent over time and across products. Furthermore, most of the variation in their future rating behavior can be explained by their rating behavior in the past rather than by the observed average rating. Second, reviews by reviewers with higher absolute bias in rating in the past receive more helpful votes in future. We further divide the bias in rating into intrinsic bias (driven by intrinsic reviewer characteristics) and extrinsic bias (driven by influences beyond intrinsic bias) and document that intrinsic bias plays a more significant role in influencing helpful votes for reviews than extrinsic bias. Our results are robust to different product categories and different definition of bias. Overall our results indicate that in the online review context, the observed average rating or an attention grabbing strategy may not be as important as believed in the past. This study provides insights into reviewers' rating behavior and prescribes actionable items for online vendors so that they can proactively influence online opinion instead of passively responding to them.

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

Abstract: 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 consumer's 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.

Embedded Markets, Communities, and the Invisible Hand of Social Norms:

Abstract: The authors'ethnographic work on social norms is intended to unravel the noninstrumental core of embedded markets. In offering a theory of “the invisible hand of social norms,” the authors show that consumer and seller behavior have expressive, moral, and emotional underpinnings that cannot be understood without a broader conceptualization of human motives and actions. This ethnography provides a rich understanding of the role of community and the behavioral dimensions of markets, which in turn helps deconstruct the current axiomatic treatment of transaction-centric markets and to reconstruct the market as a socially embedded institution in which community ties are formed and sustained.

Search Algorithms Under Different Kinds of Heuristics—A Comparative Study

Abstract: Three heuristic search algorithms, called algorithms a, b and c, are presented. Their performance, with the admissibility condition relaxed, is compared using the following two criteria: (i) number of node expansions and (ii) cost of solution found. First, a general comparison is made. In this process some variations and extensions of c are also considered. Subsequently, two types of heuristic estimates, called proper and path dependent, are defined, and the algorithms are reexamined. It is shown that on the whole a (Nilsson's algorithm) and b (Martelli's algorithm) are inferior to c, which is a slightly modified version of b. 7 references.