Towards Sub-regional cooperation: India’s Northeast and Bangladesh

The South Asian countries have a shared past based on deep-rooted common cultural heritage and historical legacy. The region has demographic and geographical advantages young labour force and a contiguous border. The spatial dimension of regional integration of Northeast India and Bangladesh can be inferred from the historical fact that economic growth of Northeast during the British rule flourished essentially on the strength of its integrated transport network through East Bengal. Inland-water trade between India and Bangladesh is important in linking not only Assam but the region as a whole to Bangladesh. Cost effective trade routes through water ways is more important than land routes for India’s Northeast through the corridors of Bangladesh. Notwithstanding the importance of waterways, the land routes continue to be the safe transit for informal trade between both the countries.Regional cooperation; Northeast India

Transaction Cost and Asymmetry of Information -The Twin Odds of Indian Commercial Banks in Rural Credit Market: Theoretical Fragility

This paper delves into the issues of transaction cost and asymmetry of information in the rural credit market. The first two sections deal with theoretical postulation of bank intermediation. The third section discusses the policy and administrative interventions in the rural credit market in India. The fourth section discusses the problem of asymmetry of information and high transaction cost the faced by the commercial banks in the rural credit market in India. The fifth section analyses the interrelation between the role of trust and transaction cost and examines the role of SHGs in bridging information asymmetry, fostering trust between bankers and the rural borrowers and thereby reduce the transaction cost.Transaction cost, information asymmetry

Bane of rural credit market: presence of money lender or absence of structural synchronicity

Working out ways to lift people out of poverty is a key objective within development economics. One policy area that has attracted a lot of theoretical attention is credit, access to which is often seen as critical in enabling people to transform their production and employment activities and to exit poverty. Of the total households in rural India, approximately 41 percent of the households are without any cultivable land. Along with growing landlessness there has been an increase in no occupation among the rural households. Since indebtedness is directly related to the expenditure level of the rural households, the growing landlessness and no occupation among rural households has led to overall decrease in rural indebtedness in 1999-2000. The money lenders have again emerged as the major sources of rural debt compared to the period during 1983-1993 when banks had a major share of debt for the rural households. The real issue before rural credit market is not the presence or absence of money lenders but the synchronicity between rural capital structure and the productive activities in these areas which has been the missing link.Rural credit; moneylenders

Quality Sensitive Price Competition in Spectrum Oligopoly

We investigate a spectrum oligopoly where primary users allow secondary access in lieu of financial remuneration. Transmission qualities of the licensed bands fluctuate randomly. Each primary needs to select the price of its channel with the knowledge of its own channel state but not that of its competitors. Secondaries choose among the channels available on sale based on their states and prices. We formulate the price selection as a non-cooperative game and prove that a symmetric Nash equilibrium (NE) strategy profile exists uniquely. We explicitly compute this strategy profile and analytically and numerically evaluate its efficiency. Our structural results provide certain key insights about the unique symmetric NE.Comment: Presented in ISIT' 2013, Istanbul Version 2 contains some modified versions of proofs of version 1. In IEEE Proceedings of International Symposium on Information Theory, 201

Quality Sensitive Price Competition in Spectrum Oligopoly:Part 1

We investigate a spectrum oligopoly market where primaries lease their channels to secondaries in lieu of financial remuneration. Transmission quality of a channel evolves randomly. Each primary has to select the price it would quote without knowing the transmission qualities of its competitors' channels. Each secondary buys a channel depending on the price and the transmission quality a channel offers. We formulate the price selection problem as a non co-operative game with primaries as players. In the one-shot game, we show that there exists a unique symmetric Nash Equilibrium(NE) strategy profile and explicitly compute it. Our analysis reveals that under the NE strategy profile a primary prices its channel to render high quality channel more preferable to the secondary; this negates the popular belief that prices ought to be selected to render channels equally preferable to the secondary regardless of their qualities. We show the loss of revenue in the asymptotic limit due to the non co-operation of primaries. In the repeated version of the game, we characterize a subgame perfect NE where a primary can attain a payoff arbitrarily close to the payoff it would obtain when primaries co-operate.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. 41 pages single column format.Conference version is available at arXiv:1305.335

Uncertain Price Competition in a Duopoly with Heterogeneous Availability

We study the price competition in a duopoly with an arbitrary number of buyers. Each seller can offer multiple units of a commodity depending on the availability of the commodity which is random and may be different for different sellers. Sellers seek to select a price that will be attractive to the buyers and also fetch adequate profits. The selection will in general depend on the number of units available with the seller and also that of its competitor - the seller may only know the statistics of the latter. The setting captures a secondary spectrum access network, a non-neutral Internet, or a microgrid network in which unused spectrum bands, resources of ISPs, and excess power units constitute the respective commodities of sale. We analyze this price competition as a game, and identify a set of necessary and sufficient properties for the Nash Equilibrium (NE). The properties reveal that sellers randomize their price using probability distributions whose support sets are mutually disjoint and in decreasing order of the number of availability. We prove the uniqueness of a symmetric NE in a symmetric market, and explicitly compute the price distribution in the symmetric NE.Comment: 45 pages, Accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Automatic Contro