Variety Seeking Behaviour as a Measure of Enduring Loyalty

AbstractPurposeThe following paper aims to study how the variety seeking behaviour impacts the value creation process and in turn has implications on customer loyalty. It also tries to measure the success of the coalition loyalty programmes which satisfy the variety seeking behaviour. Design/Methodology/Approach: A structured questionnaire was developed and various aspects of the loyalty programme were studied. The data analysis consisted of exploratory factor analysis, chi-square analysis and Fisher's exact analysis test. Findings: The study reveals the importance of acceptance of variety seeking behaviour as a value which the customer derives by joining the coalition based loyalty programmes. It also reveals how the ease and simplicity of joining the coalition programme has an impact on the loyalty levels. Practical implications: We believe that this research will benefit the managers in strategizing for particular segments of their loyalty programme members. It will enable their understanding of the fact the greater customer co-creation, higher are the loyalty levels. Originality/Value: There has been little research on the variety seeking behaviour and its impact on the loyalty levels of the customer. This research paper tries to fill in this gap. It also tries to link Co-creation of the consumption experience and its impact on the loyalty levels. Limitations/Future research: This research was done in India and therefore a wider geographic and demographic reach and study across comparative coalition loyalty programmes will help to establish the model proposed

Synthesis, Analgesic and Anti-inflammatory Activities of 3- Ethyl-2-substituted Amino-3H-quinazolin-4-ones

Purpose: To synthesize a series of novel 3-ethyl-2-substituted amino-quinazolin-4(3H)-ones and evaluate them for their analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities.Methods: The compounds, 3-ethyl-2-substituted amino-quinazolin-4(3H)-ones, were synthesized by reacting the amino group of 3-ethyl-2-hydrazino quinazolin-4(3H)-one with a variety of aldehydes and ketones. The synthesized compounds were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), protonnuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-NMR) and mass spectrometry. The purity of the compounds was determined by elemental analysis. Test for analgesic activity was performed by tail-flick technique using Wistar albino mice while anti-inflammatory activity was evaluated by carrageenaninduced paw oedema test in rats. Diclofenac sodium was used as positive control for both analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities.Results: The compound, 3-ethyl-2-(cyclohexylidene-hydrazino)-3H-quinazolin-4-one (AS1), emerged as the active analgesic (activity, 63.89 %) and anti-inflammatory (activity, 60.00 %) compound of the series, and compared well with the reference standard, diclofenac sodium, which exbited analgesic and anti-inflammatory activities of 62.04 and 65.11 %, respectivelyConclusion: The compound (AS1) can serve as a lead molecule for further development to a clinically useful novel class of analgesic and anti-inflammatory agents.Keywords: Quinazoline, Analgesic, Anti-inflammatory, Synthesi

How did Markets and Public Sentiment React During Demonetization? Study of a Significant Event in the Indian Economy

The present study aims to determine the impact of shock of demonetization which happened in November 2016 in India. It has been observed in literature that while the market moves due to unforeseen events, market movements are largely affected by news reports on such events. Considering these two threads and the association between them, the study follows mixed method research methodology and assesses the impact of demonetization on stock market movement through time series analysis and text analytics of news items generated during the period. This study examines, through time series analysis, the impact of demonetization as an unexpected event on stock market movement. Time series analysis evaluates the impact on overall stock market movements and on sectoral indices, liquidity shocks in the emerging Indian economy due to demonetization. This study integrates time series analysis with robustness tests and follows text analytics, news analytics and sentiment analytics to gauge public sentiment (influenced by media coverage) during the event. These evaluations validate negative movements in the market and most of the sectors due to the negative sentiment of people about demonetization

Renormalisation Group Flows of the SYK Model

We explore computationally tractable deformations of the SYK model. The deformed theories are described by the sum of two SYK Hamiltonians with differing numbers, $q$ and $\tilde{q}$, of interacting fermions. In the large $N$ limit, employing analytic and numerical tools, we compute finite temperature correlation functions and thermodynamic quantities. We identify a novel analytically solvable RG flow in the large $q$ limit. We find that, under certain circumstances, the RG flow in the strongly coupled infrared phase exhibits two regions of linear-in-temperature entropy, which we interpret in terms of Schwarzian actions. Using conformal perturbation theory we compute the leading relevant correction away from the intermediate near-conformal fixed point. Holographic spacetimes in two spacetime dimensions that reproduce the thermodynamics of the microphysical theory are discussed. These are flow geometries that interpolate between two Euclidean near-AdS$_2$ spacetimes with different radii. The Schwarzian soft mode corresponding to the AdS$_2$ region in the deep interior resides entirely within the geometric regime.Comment: 27 pages plus appendices, 16 figure

Recognition and matching in the presence of deformation and lighting change

Natural images of objects and scenes show a fascinating amount of variability due to different factors like lighting and viewpoint change, occlusion, articulation and non-rigid deformation. There are certain cases like recognition of specular objects and images with arbitrary deformations where existing techniques do not perform well. For image deformation, we propose a method for faster keypoint matching with histogram descriptors and a completely deformation invariant representation. We also propose a method for improving specular object recognition. Histograms are a powerful statistical representation for keypoint matching and content based image retrieval. The earth mover's distance (EMD) is an important perceptually meaningful metric for comparing histograms, but it suffers from high (O(n3 log n)) computational complexity. We propose a novel linear time algorithm for approximating EMD with the weighted L1 norm of the wavelet transform of the difference histogram. We prove that the resulting wavelet EMD metric is equivalent to EMD. We experimentally show that wavelet EMD is a good approximation to EMD, has similar performance, but requires much less computation. We also give a fast algorithm for the best partial EMD match between two histograms. Images of non-planar object can undergo a large non-linear deformation due to a viewpoint change. Complex deformations occur in images of non-rigid objects, for example, in medical image sequences. We propose using the contour tree as a novel framework invariant to arbitrary deformations for representing and comparing images. It represents all the deformation invariant information in an image. Lighting changes greatly affect the appearance of specular objects and make recognition difficult much more than for Lambertian objects. In model based recognition of specular objects, an important constraint is that the estimated lighting should be non-negative everywhere. We propose a new method to enforce this constraint and explore its usefulness in specular object recognition, using the spherical harmonic representation of lighting. The new method is faster as well as more accurate than previous methods. Experiments on both synthetic and real data indicate that the constraint can improve recognition of specular objects by better separating the correct and incorrect models

Chaos in a well : Effects of competing length scales

A discontinuous generalization of the standard map, which arises naturally as the dynamics of a periodically kicked particle in a one dimensional infinite square well potential, is examined. Existence of competing length scales, namely the width of the well and the wavelength of the external field, introduce novel dynamical behaviour. Deterministic chaos induced diffusion is observed for weak field strengths as the length scales do not match. This is related to an abrupt breakdown of rotationally invariant curves and in particular KAM tori. An approximate stability theory is derived wherein the usual standard map is a point of ``bifurcation''.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Classical bifurcations and entanglement in smooth Hamiltonian system

We study entanglement in two coupled quartic oscillators. It is shown that the entanglement, as measured by the von Neumann entropy, increases with the classical chaos parameter for generic chaotic eigenstates. We consider certain isolated periodic orbits whose bifurcation sequence affects a class of quantum eigenstates, called the channel localized states. For these states, the entanglement is a local minima in the vicinity of a pitchfork bifurcation but is a local maxima near a anti-pitchfork bifurcation. We place these results in the context of the close connections that may exist between entanglement measures and conventional measures of localization that have been much studied in quantum chaos and elsewhere. We also point to an interesting near-degeneracy that arises in the spectrum of reduced density matrices of certain states as an interplay of localization and symmetry.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure