Modeling urban traffic planning thro' strategic decisions- A case from Bangalore, India

This paper deals with reducing the waiting times of vehicles at the traffic junctions by synchronizing the traffic signals. Strategies are suggested for betterment of the situation at different time intervals of the day, thus ensuring smooth flow of traffic. The concept of single way systems are also analyzed. The situation is simulated in Witness 2003 Simulation package using various conventions. The average waiting times are reduced by providing an optimal combination for the traffic signal timer. Different signal times are provided for different times of the day, thereby further reducing the average waiting times at specific junctions/roads according to the experienced demands.

Strategic Marketing and Innovation Performance of Indian MSMEs

Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is an integral part of the Indian industrial sector. The distinctive features of MSMEs are less capital investment and high labour absorption which has created unprecedented importance to this sector. As per the Development Commissioner of MSME, the sector has the credit of being the second highest in employment in India, which stands next to agricultural sector. The MSMEs are very much needed in efficiently allocating the enormous labour supply and scarce capital by implementing labour intensive production processes. Associated with this high growth rates, MSMEs are also facing a number of problems like sub-optimal scale of operation, technological obsolescence, supply chain inefficiencies, increasing domestic and global competition, fund shortages, change in manufacturing & marketing strategies, turbulent and uncertain market scenario. To survive with such issues and compete with large and global enterprises, MSMEs need to adopt innovative approaches in their regular business operations. Among the manufacturing sectors, we find that they are unable to focus themselves in the present competition. This paper presents a brief literature of work done in MSMEs, Innovation and Strategic marketing with reference to Indian manufacturing firms.

Technological-forecasting and research inputs in area of birth-control technology

Technological forecasting, defined as quantified probabilistic prediction of timings and degree of change in the technological parameters, capabilities desirability or needs at different times in the future, is applied to birth control technology (BCT) as a means of revealing the paths of most promising research through identifying the necessary points for breakthroughs. The present status of BCT in the areas of pills and the IUD, male contraceptives, immumological approaches, post-coital pills, abortion, sterilization, luteolytic agents, laser technologies, and control of the sex of the child, are each summarized and evaluated in turn. Fine mapping is done to identify the most potentially promising areas of BCT. These include efforts to make oral contraception easier, improvement of the design of the IUD, clinical evaluation of the male contraceptive danazol, the effecting of biochemical changes in the seminal fluid, and researching of immunological approaches and the effects of other new drugs such as prostaglandins. The areas that require immediate and large research inputs are oral contraception and the IUD. On the basis of population and technological forecasts, it is deduced that research efforts could most effectively aid countries like India through the immediate production of an oral contraceptive pill or IUD with long-lasting effects. Development of a pill for males or an immunization against pre gnancy would also have a significant impact. However, the major impediment to birth control programs to date is attitudes, which must be changed through education.

Cost Sharing Mechanisms for Business Clusters with Strategic Firms

A business cluster is a co-located group of micro, small, medium scale enterprises. Such firms can benefit significantly from their co-location through shared infrastructure and shared services. Cost sharing becomes an important issue in such sharing arrangements especially when the firms exhibit strategic behavior. There are many cost sharing methods and mechanisms proposed in the literature based on game theoretic foundations. These mechanisms satisfy a variety of efficiency and fairness properties such as allocative efficiency, budget balance, individual rationality, consumer sovereignty, strategyproofness, and group strategyproofness. In this paper, we motivate the problem of cost sharing in a business cluster with strategic firms and illustrate different cost sharing mechanisms through the example of a cluster of firms sharing a logistics service. Next we look into the problem of a business cluster sharing ICT (information and communication technologies) infrastructure and explore the use of cost sharing mechanisms.

The process of technological innovations in small enterprises: the Indian way

This paper probes how two small foundries in Belgaum, Karnataka State, India, have achieved technological innovations successfully based on their technological capability and customer needs, enabling them to sail through the competitive environment. This study brought out that technically qualified entrepreneurs of both the foundries have carried out technological innovations, mainly due to their self-motivation and self-efforts. Changing product designs, as desired or directed by the customers, cost reduction, quality improvement and import substitution through reverse engineering are the characteristics of these technological innovations. These incremental innovations have enabled the entrepreneurs of the two foundries to enhance competitiveness, grow in the domestic market and penetrate the international market and grow in size over time.

The process of technological innovations in small enterprises: the Indian way

This paper probes how two small foundries in Belgaum, Karnataka State, India, have achieved technological innovations successfully based on their technological capability and customer needs, enabling them to sail through the competitive environment. This study brought out that technically qualified entrepreneurs of both the foundries have carried out technological innovations, mainly due to their self-motivation and self-efforts. Changing product designs, as desired or directed by the customers, cost reduction, quality improvement and import substitution through reverse engineering are the characteristics of these technological innovations. These incremental innovations have enabled the entrepreneurs of the two foundries to enhance competitiveness, grow in the domestic market and penetrate the international market and grow in size over time.

Role of Management Decision Variables in Determining Technology Progress and Technical Efficiency in Indian Electronic Industry

This paper analyses the influence of management on Technical Efficiency Change (TEC) and Technological Progress (TP) in the communication equipment and consumer electronics sub-sectors of Indian hardware electronics industry. Each sub-sector comprises 13 sample firms for two time periods.The primary objective is to determine the relative contribution of TP and TEC to TFP Growth (TFPG) and to establish the influence of firm specific operational management decision variables on these two components. The study finds that both the sub-sectors have strived and achieved steady TP but not TEC in the period of economic liberalisation to cope with the intensifying competition. The management decisions with respect to asset and profit utilization, vertical integration, among others, improved TP and TE in the sub-sectors. However, R&D investments and technology imports proved costly for TFP indicating inadequate efforts and/or poor resource utilisation by the management. Management was found to be complacent in terms of improving or developing their own technology as indicated by their higher dependence on import of raw materials and no influence of R&D on TP.

Opportunistic Scheduling in Cellular Systems in the Presence of Noncooperative Mobiles

A central scheduling problem in wireless communications is that of allocating resources to one of many mobile stations that have a common radio channel. Much attention has been given to the design of efficient and fair scheduling schemes that are centrally controlled by a base station (BS) whose decisions depend on the channel conditions reported by each mobile. The BS is the only entity taking decisions in this framework. The decisions are based on the reports of mobiles on their radio channel conditions. In this paper, we study the scheduling problem from a game-theoretic perspective in which some of the mobiles may be noncooperative or strategic, and may not necessarily report their true channel conditions. We model this situation as a signaling game and study its equilibria. We demonstrate that the only Perfect Bayesian Equilibria (PBE) of the signaling game are of the babbling type: the noncooperative mobiles send signals independent of their channel states, the BS simply ignores them, and allocates channels based only on the prior information on the channel statistics. We then propose various approaches to enforce truthful signaling of the radio channel conditions: a pricing approach, an approach based on some knowledge of the mobiles' policies, and an approach that replaces this knowledge by a stochastic approximations approach that combines estimation and control. We further identify other equilibria that involve non-truthful signaling.

Dynamic mechanism design for markets with strategic resources

The assignment of tasks to multiple resources becomes an interesting game theoretic problem, when both the task owner and the resources are strategic. In the classical, nonstrategic setting, where the states of the tasks and resources are observable by the controller, this problem is that of finding an optimal policy for a Markov decision process (MDP). When the states are held by strategic agents, the problem of an efficient task allocation extends beyond that of solving an MDP and becomes that of designing a mechanism. Motivated by this fact, we propose a general mechanism which decides on an allocation rule for the tasks and resources and a payment rule to incentivize agents' participation and truthful reports. In contrast to related dynamic strategic control problems studied in recent literature, the problem studied here has interdependent values: the benefit of an allocation to the task owner is not simply a function of the characteristics of the task itself and the allocation, but also of the state of the resources. We introduce a dynamic extension of Mezzetti's two phase mechanism for interdependent valuations. In this changed setting, the proposed dynamic mechanism is efficient, within period ex-post incentive compatible, and within period ex-post individually rational.