Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved significantly since the past 50 years. The existing bouquet of DSS contributions offering the prevalent emphasis and future orientations of the field also point towards several shortcomings. The existing conceptualizations of DSS offer a fragmented portrayal of the field, with a demarcation of the academia and the industry. The literature also presented a disjoint representation of the tenets of DSS. We address these concerns in this research by synthesizing the conceptual elements of DSS towards a coherent understanding of the field. We resort to an automated content analysis procedure using text mining in an open-source platform. Lexical analysis, topic modeling, and other data mining techniques were used to unveil the latent elements of DSS. Our findings indicate the three underlying themes of DSS as 'Plan', 'Design', and 'Use'. We further identified the elements of pivotal importance of DSS that helped us in re-conceptualizing the understanding of DSS. Our validation of the notion of DSS based on the practitioner's viewpoints also attended to the issue of the academia-industry divide in terms of the perception of DSS. Further, we propose an extension of the ‘Plan-Design-Use’ model through a feedback loop based on which we present the future design possibilities in DSS in terms of the reusability of the extant DSS contributions. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature.

The present study explores the underlying motivational process and their boundary conditions behind portfolio (asset class) diversification choice decisions through the lenses of ‘regulatory focus’ and ‘regulatory fit’ theories. The study specifically focuses on how such choice decisions differ across chronic (trait) and situational (state) goal-orientation conditions. We use an experimental research design with a survey-based sample of 586 respondents and a two-way ANOVA test for analyzing data collected in two phases. Our principal findings are as follows: (i) investors with chronic promotion (prevention) conditions adopt wider (narrower) portfolio choices; (ii) in convergent promotion (prevention) conditions, they espouse wider (narrower) portfolio choices as compared to the chronic conditions; and (iii) in convergent promotion (prevention) conditions, they prefer wider (narrower) choices than in the divergent conditions. We support our findings by a detailed discussion along with the theoretical and managerial implications. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

Bitcoin as an asset class has received phenomenal investor attention and is considered to have similar characteristics like gold. This study aims to analyze the price behavior of bitcoin and apply machine learning algorithm for its prediction. Understanding the nature of Bitcoin price series is a multi-scale problem, and it can be best examined by analyzing its compositional characteristics. This study uses complete empirical ensemble mode decomposition (CEEMD) to analyze the nature of Bitcoin price series. Daily Bitcoin prices from 2012 to 2018 are used to perform CEEMD to identify the short term, medium term, and long-term trend in the Bitcoin price series. The study uses support vector machine (SVM) learning algorithm to find whether it can predict Bitcoin prices and finds that SVM predicts five steps ahead Bitcoin prices for the short term, medium term, long term, and overall Bitcoin price level. © 2020

Adoption of the Paris Agreement in December 2015 and its subsequent ratification through Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) marked, among other things, India’s commitment to reduce the emission intensity of its GDP by 33–35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 level. The transport sector, being the prime conduit of production value-chain, has been a major contributor to global energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, it is critical production research study that needs to evaluate the linkage of NDC with freight transport. The proposed framework consists of goal setting, seeking expert opinion and driving insights into the field of freight transport. First, goal and criteria or attribute for achieving NDC through the freight sector are identified. Next, expert opinions from transport and climate change specialists  are sought. Lastly, results and insights related to the most feasible alternatives, such as heavy road, heavy rail, hybrid, heavy waterborne, and heavy air with regard to the select attributes and its sub-attributes viz, slower growth, structural changes in sector and economy, strategic and operational choices, technology and innovation and regulatory and economic instruments with the help of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) are drawn. The strength of the proposed methodology is that it uses FAHP to prescribe definitive solutions to climate change policymakers and logistics and supply chain managers who otherwise would have found difficulties  with such an arcane subject having partial and little quantified information. © 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Integrating sustainability into freight transportation systems (FTSs) is a complex and challenging task due to the sheer number of inherent sustainability risks. Sustainability risks disrupt the economic, social and environmental objectives of freight operations and act as impediments in the development of sustainable freight transportation systems. The area of sustainability risk management is still unexplored and immature in the operational research domain. This study addresses these research gaps and contributes in a threefold manner. First, a total of 36 potential sustainability risks related to FTSs are identified and uniquely classified into seven categories using a rigourous approach. Second, the research proposes two prominent perspectives, namely, ontological and epistemological perspectives to understand risks and develops a novel framework for managing sustainability risks in FTSs. Third, a novel approach by integrating fuzzy evidential reasoning algorithm (FERA) with expected utility theory is developed to quantitatively model and profile sustainability risk for different risk preferences, namely, risk-averse, risk-neutral, and risk-taking scenarios. The proposed FERA is a flexible and robust approach, which transforms the experts’ inputs into belief structures and aggregates them using the evidence combination rule proposed in Dempster–Shafer theory to overcome the problem of imprecise results caused by average scoring in existing models. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model. Unlike conventional perception, our study suggests that most of the high priority sustainability risks are behaviorally and socially induced rather than financially driven. The results provide significant managerial implications including a focus on skills development, and on social and behavioral dimensions while managing risks in FTSs. © 2019 Society for Risk Analysis

In this digital era, it is important for service providers to gain insights from the customer-generated data and act accordingly for gaining a competitive advantage over competitors. However, there are few studies that have attempted at utilising the online user-reviews in structural-models for examining the factors affecting user-behaviour. Additionally, there is a paucity of studies that have utilised the sentiment and emotional aspects to understand the motives affecting usage intentions. This study attempts to address this gap by exploring various uses and gratifications valued by users for different e-learning providers in India, namely, Coursera, Lynda, Udemy, Udacity and Byjus, by analysing the tweets posted by users using various official handles. Utilising a Natural-Language-Processing (NLP)-based approach (sentiment and opinion-mining) and 5868 tweets, the customer motives were analysed and mapped to the various gratifications. Results of the natural language processing-based structural-equation-modelling (NLP-SEM) technique show that consumers of different companies value gratifications differently. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Learning outcomes: Ethical leadership and decision-making, engaging and managing multiple conflicting stakeholders. Case overview/synopsis: Utkal Alumina International Limited (UAIL), an ambitious Greenfield project of Hindalco Industries Ltd. faced the challenges of conflicting multiple stakeholders and collective resistance that did not allow UAIL to be commissioned for almost two decades. The case portrayed the journey of a new leader of UAIL in the path of transforming collective resistance to collective collaboration. In the case, the author was introspecting about how far the author could achieve the objective of collective collaborations through stakeholders’ engagements and what would be the next path of the journey. Complexity academic level: MBA and executive development programs. Supplementary materials: Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code: CSS 6: Human Resources. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: Colossal information is available in cyberspace from a variety of sources such as blogs, reviews, posts and feedback. The mentioned sources have helped in improving various business processes from product development to stock market development. This paper aims to transform this wealth of information in the online medium to economic wealth. Earlier approaches to investment decision-making are dominated by the analyst's recommendations. However, their credibility has been questioned for herding behavior, conflict of interest and favoring underwriter's firms. This study assumes that members of the online crowd who have been reliable, profitable and knowledgeable in the recent past will continue to be so soon. Design/methodology/approach: The authors identify credible members as experts using multi-criteria decision-making tools. In this work, an alternative actionable investment strategy is proposed and demonstrated through a mock-up. The experimental prototype is divided into two phases: expert selection and investment. Findings: The created portfolio is comparable and even profitable than several major global stock indices. Practical implications: This work aims to benefit individual investors, investment managers and market onlookers. Originality/value: This paper takes into account factors: the accuracy and trustworthiness of the sources of stock market recommendations. Earlier work in the area has focused solely intelligence of the analyst for the stock recommendation. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the combined intelligence of the virtual investment communities has been considered to make stock market recommendations. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Identifying communication patterns of narratives in disclosed financial statements is assuming importance in recent times. This paper explores the communication patterns through various channels of loser firms which have witnessed prolonged underperformance and compare the same w.r.t their peers from the same industry. We perform sentiment analysis in published communication of these firms, to scrutinize their tone and emotional-valence. Our findings suggest that loser firms have a negative mood while conveying earnings vis-à-vis their comparable firms. Further, it is ratified that loser firms lack trust, joy, and surprise elements and they depict a surge of fear and sadness in their communication. Moreover, the themes of discussion using the topic modeling approach are indicative of concerns that may have affected the performance of losers. This study has the potential to unveil early warning signals for firms who are in bad shape, which otherwise remains undetected through numerical disclosures. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

Extreme events as floods, droughts and heat waves ensue from climate change. There has been an increase in the frequency and intensity of such events in the past two decades. Some of the recent events have caused substantial damage to agricultural crops and loss to human lives. The recurrence of such events is a threat to social welfare, economy and humanity as a whole. Adaptation to climate change is the key and the way forward. It is observed that agriculture has historically adapted to shocks and extreme events. Agricultural adaptation and resiliency to extreme events over the last three and a half decades is gauged using secondary data. © 2020 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Many companies recruit employees from different parts of the globe, and faking behavior by potential employees is a ubiquitous phenomenon. It seems that applicants from some countries are more prone to faking compared to others, but the reasons for these differences are largely unexplored. This study relates country-level economic variables to faking behavior in hiring processes. In a cross-national study across 20 countries, participants (N = 3,839) reported their faking behavior in their last job interview. This study used the random response technique (RRT) to ensure participants’ anonymity and to foster honest answers regarding faking behavior. Results indicate that general economic indicators (gross domestic product per capita [GDP] and unemployment rate) show negligible correlations with faking across the countries, whereas economic inequality is positively related to the extent of applicant faking to a substantial extent. These findings imply that people are sensitive to inequality within countries and that inequality relates to faking, because inequality might actuate other psychological processes (e.g., envy) which in turn increase the probability for unethical behavior in many forms. © 2020 The Authors. Applied Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association of Applied Psychology

This paper analyses the relationship between a firm’s accounting risk and performance for a large sample of listed Indian firms observed over the period 2000–2015. We find evidence that the relationship is not absolute but contingent on the level of firm performance. We show that poorly performing firms below a threshold level of performance exhibit a ‘paradoxical’ or inverse relationship, while the firms above the threshold exhibit a non-linear relationship with a clear point of inflection. We posit that the former observation is due to a risk-seeking behaviour by the poor performers in line with behavioural finance theories while the latter is a result of a mixed-risk-behaviour. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The knowledge exchanges literature considered all types of knowledge exchanges as reactive. The present study develops the conceptual framework and the measure of knowledge-based proactive helping that was missing in earlier literature. The measure was validated across multiple population. Proactive helping was manifested in the scale items effectively, to the extent that at first, initially chosen five dimensions merged to form two factors: professional development and problem mitigation and; subsequent analysis revealed that the factors represented the same underlying construct of proactive helping. The nomological network, a process model highlighting the psychosocial causes and benefits of proactive helping based upon social exchange theory and social motivation theory was also proposed. The significance of the study was in bringing the prosocial, proactive exchanges at the forefront of knowledge exchanges, which predominantly focussed on reactive exchanges. Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2018.

Information Technology (IT) is rapidly transforming higher education (HE). Past studies concluded that IT positively influences HE students’ learning outcomes. However, these studies either focused on specific IT or utilized formal classroom setting. The present study overcomes these limitations, along with drawing implications by analyzing 72 quantitative peer-reviewed articles. It reveals that: (a) IT highly enhances learning outcomes education subject, while moderately for language, medical and nursing subjects. The learning outcomes for science and technology subjects are low; (b) unexpectedly, general applications are more effective than learning-oriented applications; (c) formal learning environment is more effective; and (d) learning outcomes are higher for longer intervention period (> 1 month) than smaller intervention period (? 24 hours). © 2020 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This paper investigates the differential preferences towards corporate-governance and other firm-level characteristics by Domestic-Institutional-Investors (DIIs) and Foreign-institutional-investors (FIIs) in the Indian context. We use data across 25,065 firm-years on institutional holding and deploy a series of univariate tests, a two-stage Fama–Mcbeth regression and a discrete-choice-model for analysis. We substantiate our results from the main analysis using a series of robustness tests. Our results highlight some common preferences and dislikes among these institutional investors. Both FIIs and DIIs prefer larger firms with higher liquidity, which pay higher dividends and generate higher ROE. They both dislike expensive (high P-B) stocks and stocks with high variability in earnings. However, there are also some visible differences in FII and DII preferences with respect to firm-level traits like corporate-governance, age, Tobin's-Q and leverage. The institutional preferences are found to be sticky and do not change across market cycles. The findings could be of value to policymakers in India and, by extension, other emerging countries in understanding and regulating institutional inflows. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Smartphones are playing a major role in delivering effective solutions to the day-to-day problems of our society. Smartphones have smart applications that encompasses a whole range of domains ranging from the online payments systems such as (Paytm, Phonepe, BHIM etc) to the food delivery systems such as (Zomato, Swiggy, Uber eats etc). In this paper, we have proposed and designed a cloud-based smart-phone application 'Mission Swachhta' that focuses on delivering a clean society. The main aim of this application is to bridge the gap between the end-users (people) and the authorities to attain a clean environment. This paper covers both the system and hardware requirements of this application. Also, it briefs about the functionalities of each components and inter-components interactions. The supposed target audience for this report includes capacity traders and technical designers. Additionally, even though the meant target market of this record isn't the ultimate client, its miles intended to be readable through a typical Mission Swachhta app person. This report will not only give the software and hardware requirements for the functioning of the software however will even give a detailed view of the interrelation and interaction of the consumer with the software and the way to efficaciously enforce the cloud for record garage and infrastructure. The consumer can speak with the desired authority in addition to can register his grievances and dutiful movement is taken at the registered grievance. © 2020 IEEE.

This article explores long-term equity and operating performance of Indian firms issuing initial public offerings (IPOs) backed by venture capital/private equity (VC/PE) funding. Using data for 173 IPOs backed by VC/PE funding during 2000–2016, the article shows that equity market performance of VC/PE-backed IPOs is unimpressive post issue, compared to their peers. This is not only due to market perception but also associated with a declining operating performance. However, information asymmetry, mispricing and ‘timing the market’ by issuing firms do not seem to be the reasons for such long-term underperformance. We argue that it may be a case of too much money chasing too few winners for Indian IPOs and individual rent-seeking activities by managers. The observation raises the question of effectiveness of the monitoring role of venture capitalists or PE funders post the IPO in an Indian context. This is substantiated by our additional finding that sustained monitoring and hand-holding by venture capitalists and PE funders post the IPO cause an improvement in performance. The findings of this study can have significant implications for all stakeholders, particularly common investors in the Indian equity market. © 2020 International Management Institute, New Delhi.

Social Entrepreneurship (SE) is a popular area of research and practice. An analysis of the existing literature reviews on SE reveals a dearth of studies classifying the existing SE literature into multiple research themes and further presenting popular and less popular research themes. With the aim of bridging this gap, this study presents a systematic review of 188 peer reviewed SSCI journal articles published in last decade. It presents an overview of recent SE research, classifying it in five main themes while identifying the thrust areas of research in each. Based on identified research gaps, we provide future research directions, contexts and methodology. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.

Purpose: This study aims to examine a dual-pathway model that recognizes two distinct (formal and informal) but complementary mechanisms of knowledge exchanges – knowledge sharing and knowledge helping. It also investigates how team members use their limited human and psychosocial capital for prosocial knowledge effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach: A survey-based approach was used to examine the hypotheses of the study. A moderated-mediation model was proposed and tested using bootstrap approach. Findings: Knowledge sharing and knowledge helping were found to be the significant links through which human capital (capability) and psychosocial capital (motivation and efficacy) significantly predict prosocial knowledge effectiveness. Post hoc analysis suggests that human capital through knowledge sharing influences team learning, whereas the psychosocial capital through knowledge helping influences team leadership. Originality/value: The present study found two distinct but complementary and yet necessary mechanisms of knowledge exchanges to be linked as the important outlay for the human and psychosocial capital to be effective in the prosocial knowledge behaviours. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Analysing Indian equity data from 1995 to 2014, we conclude that median portfolios, which have received little attention from most researchers of value premium (VP) and size premium (SP), are quite pivotal. Mid-market-capitalisation portfolios exhibit zero VP and mid-price-to-book portfolios, zero SP. A move to lower market-capitalisation (MC) or price-to-book-ratio (PB) makes premium – VP or SP, as the case may be – positive; a move toward higher MC or PB makes the premium negative. This may be due to differences in the ways investors choose among small-MC and within big-MC, and weigh book-value vis-a-vis growth-potential. We believe this is a unique finding not, as yet, reported anywhere. © 2019