Learned Generosity? A Field Experiment with Parents and Their Children

An active area of research within the social sciences concerns the underlying motivation for sharing scarce resources and engaging in other pro-social actions. We develop a theoretical framework that sheds light on the developmental origins of social preferences by providing mechanisms through which parents transmit preferences for generosity to their children. Then, we conduct a field experiment with nearly 150 3-5 year old children and their parents, measuring (1) whether child and parent generosity is correlated, (2) whether children are influenced by their parents when making sharing decisions and (3) whether parents model generosity to children. We observe no correlation of independently measured parent and child sharing decisions at this young age. Yet, we find that apart from those choosing an equal allocation of resources between themselves and another child, children adjust their behaviors to narrow the gap with their parent's or other adult's choice. We find that fathers, and parents of initially generous children, increase their sharing when informed that their child will be shown their choice

Mapping the Trajectory of Indian Social Science Research: A Decadal Bibliometric Analysis

The present study evaluated the trends in publications and citations in social science research funded by Indian funding agencies over the last decade. We identified the key research areas, preferred document types for publication, and authorship patterns in funded publications using bibliometric mining and visualization.  Analysis of 2040 publications produced during the last decade (2014-2023) indexed in Social Science Citation Index of Web of Science revealed that they received a total of 41015 citations, averaging 21.11 citations per paper. The mean relative growth rate of both publications and citations were higher during the first five years (MRp=0.20, MRc=0.12) and declined during the second (MRp=-0.08, MRc=-0.70). A similar trend was seen in the mean doubling time of publications and citations during the first five years (DTp=0.29, DTc=0.17) as compared to the second five-year block period (DTp=-0.12, DTc=-1.01). Correlation between publications and citations was positive (r=0.574), but not statistically significant (p=.082).  "Public, Environmental & Occupational Health" was the most dominant subject area in terms of publication counts (210), and "Green & Sustainable Science & Technology" in terms of citation counts (3381).  Authors preferred to publish their research in the form of articles (86.91%).  Indian social science researchers engaged mostly in collaborative research (97.25%), with three-authored publications being the most prevalent (18.38%).  Ganesan Venkatasubramanian from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru was the most prolific author with 48 publications and 287 collaboration linkages. Based on the results, it is clear that social science research in India needs significant attention in terms of financial support.  While funding agencies need to enhance research funding, social scientists need to utilize alternative platforms such as author self-archiving repositories to get better visibility for their publications

Modeling process-switching decisions under product life cycle uncertainty

We address the process-switching decision of a firm that adopts a mixed process strategy with respect to a new product in the context of product life cycle uncertainty. A mixed process strategy uses a flexible process in the early stages of the product's life cycle and later switches to a dedicated process to gain cost economies. We present a model that captures uncertainty through alternative life-cycle demand functions to guide the process-switching decision. We develop a dynamic decision rule that can be used with any uncertainty-resolution scheme and demonstrate its application and robustness using an illustrative numerical example.Process-switching strategy Product life cycle uncertainty Production economics Conceptual modeling Decision support

A Model-Based Approach for Planning and Developing a Family of Technology-Based Products

In this paper, we address the product-family design problem of a firm in a market in which customers choose products based on some measure of product performance. By developing products as a family, the firm can reduce the cost of developing individual product variants due to the reuse of a common product platform. Such a platform, designed in an aggregate-planning phase that precedes the development of individual product variants, is itself expensive to develop. Hence, its costs must be weighted against the benefits of its reuse in a family. We offer a model for capturing costs of product development when the family consists of variants based on a common platform. It is shown that the model can be converted into a network-optimization problem, and the optimal product-family can be identified under fairly general conditions by determining the shortest path of its network formulation. We also analytically examine the effect of alternative product designs on product-family composition, and discuss the implications of investing in new-product technology. Finally, we illustrate our model and managerial insights with an application from the electronics industry.Product Family, Platform, Reusability