Inhalant abuse among street-involved children and adolescents in India: Case for epistemic recognition and reorientation
Ajazuddin Shaikh, Ankur Sarin
Journal of Research on Adolescence, May 2024
Contextualising the void of research on inhalant abuse among adolescents as epistemic neglect, in this study, we use mixed-methods action research to understand inhalant abuse in a specific context in the Global South. Focusing on a large metropolitan city in Western India, we surveyed 158 street-involved children and adolescents (110 boys and 48 girls, age range from 5 to 17 years) in a group setting along with follow-up group interviews. Despite finding a high prevalence rate of inhalant abuse, our work suggests an absence of supporting structures and emphasises the need to revisit our understanding and interpretation of substance-using behaviour of street-involved youth. Instead of explaining inhalant-abusing behaviour as emerging from pathological deficiencies in individuals or households, we stress the need to critically examine the exploitative environment they are embedded in. In doing so, we join efforts to decolonise conventional ways of understanding “deviant” behaviour.
Contests within and between groups: Theory and experiment
Puja Bhattacharya, Jeevant Rampal
Games and Economic Behavior, May 2024
We examine behaviour in a two-stage group contest where intra-group contests are followed by an inter-group contest. Rewards accrue to the winning group, with winners of the intra-group contest within that group receiving a greater reward. The model generates a discouragement effect, where losers from the first stage exert less effort in the second stage than winners. In contrast to the related literature, we show that a prior win may be disadvantageous, generating lower profits for first stage winners as compared to losers. We consider exogenous asymmetry between groups arising from a biassed group contest success function. Although the asymmetry occurs in the second stage, its effect plays out in the first stage, with higher intra-group conflict in the advantaged group. Experimental results support the qualitative predictions of the model. However, losers from the first stage bear a higher burden of the group contribution than the theoretical prediction.
Women’s empowerment and intra-household diet diversity across the urban continuum: Evidence from India’s DHS
Soumya Gupta, Payal Seth, Vidya Vemireddy, Prabhu Pingali
Food Policy, July 2024
Women’s empowerment has been associated with improved nutritional outcomes in various settings. However, the gains from empowerment do not necessarily accrue to different members of the same household in the same manner. Furthermore, the relationship between empowerment and nutrition itself is likely to be shaped by the overall level of development in a given region. This paper investigates the heterogeneity in the association between women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI) and quality of intra-household diets between men and women when spatial variations in the levels of urbanisation are accounted for, in India. We use intra household dietary intake data for 60,000 men and women from the fourth round of India’s National Family Health Survey and conceptualise women’s empowerment using the women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI). We use geospatial data on nightlights as a proxy for the urban continuum. Nightlight intensity (NTL) captures the growth of smaller towns (between large urban cities and rural areas) that has characterised urbanisation in India. A multilevel modelling approach indicates that a unit increase in WENI scores is associated with an improvement in women’s diet diversity scores by 0.19 units, with no significant association for men’s diet diversity. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this finding holds at all NTL terciles. Alongside the role of WENI, we find that a doubling of NTL is associated with an increase in diet diversity scores by at least 7–8% for both men and women, across wealth quintiles. These results emphasise the need for targeted approaches based on spatial heterogeneity in growth and development within a country when investing in the empowerment-nutrition pathway.
An exact method for tri level hub location problem with interdiction
Prasanna Ramamoorthy, Sachin Jayaswal, Ankur Sinha, Navneet Vidyarthi
European Journal of Operational Research, July 2024
In this paper, we study the problem of designing a hub network that is robust against deliberate attacks (interdictions). The problem is modelled as a three-level, two-player Stackelberg game, in which the network designer (defender) acts first to locate hubs to route a set of flows through the network. The attacker (interdictor) acts next to interdict a subset of the located hubs in the designer’s network, followed again by the defender who routes the flows through the remaining hubs in the network. We model the defender’s problem as a tri level optimization problem, wherein the attacker’s response is modelled as a bilevel hub interdiction problem. We study such a tri level problem on three variants of hub location problems studied in the literature namely: -hub median problem, -hub centre, and -hub maximal covering problems. We present a cutting plane based exact method to solve the problem. The cutting plane method uses supervalid inequalities, which is obtained from the solution of the lower level interdiction problem. To solve the lower level hub interdiction problem efficiently, we propose a penalty-based reformulation of the problem. Using the reformulation, we present a branch-and-cut based exact approach to solve the problem efficiently. We conduct experiments to show the computational advantages of the above algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, the cutting plane approach proposed in this paper is among the first exact methods to solve tri-level location–interdiction problems. Our computational results show interesting implications of incorporating interdiction risks in the hub location problem.
Addressing difficulties with abstract thinking for low-literate, low-income consumers through marketplace literacy: A bottom-up approach to consumer and marketing education
Madhu Viswanathan, Saravana Jaikumar, Arun Sreekumar, Shantanu Dutta, Adam Duhachek
The Journal of Consumer Affairs, July 2024
We examine a bottom-up approach to consumer and marketing education for subsistence consumers, that is, those with low income and relatively lower literacy levels. They face a variety of cognitive and other constraints, with difficulty in abstract thinking being a central issue that is critical for effective decision-making. We study the impact of marketplace literacy education, with its unique bottom-up approach, on abstract thinking in the consumer domain. We test the effectiveness of a bottom-up educational approach, which covers concrete examples before abstract concepts, compared to the reverse sequence of a top-down approach. We find that the bottom-up approach in marketplace literacy education leads to more abstract thinking in the consumer domain compared to a top-down approach. We discuss the implications of this research for consumer affairs.
Multi-plant firms and the heavy tail of firm size distribution
Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Shekhar Tomar
Canadian Journal of Economics, July 2024
The right tail of the firm size distribution has a heavy tail. The origin of this phenomenon, especially the specific characteristics of firms driving this pattern, remain a subject of extensive debate. Previous work has shown that plant size distribution has thinner tails than firm size distribution, indicating the role of multi-plant firms. However, we do not know whether this phenomenon is simply a mechanical effect arising from aggregation across multiple plants or whether the plants of multi-plant firms are different from those of single-plant firms. Using novel data with plant-to-firm mapping, we document that plants of multi-plant firms are more heavy-tailed than single-plant firms, indicating the dominance of the selection effect at the intensive margin. Extensive margin via aggregation of sales at the firm level plays a less crucial role than the selection effect. Importantly, single-plant exporters have a thinner tail than multi-plant non-exporters, suggesting a more dominant role of multi-plant identity than export identity in explaining heavy tails.
