XKDR Newsletter - Issue 9
Fantasy sports: Skill or chance • Improving government drug procurement • Nighttime lights software package • Delays in government contracting: Calcutta v. Delhi metro • JETP • 5 questions for 2023.
Do fantasy sports players’ actions influence their performance in Dream11 contests?
In recent years, there has been a growing debate about whether online fantasy sports are a game of skill or chance. In their new paper, Agam Gupta, Yash Khandelwal, Manish K Singh, and Ashutosh Singla attempt to answer this question with data. They create a data set of 31 games by contesting on the Dream11 platform during the ICC T20 cricket World Cup. They proxy for lack of skill by randomly selecting teams via computer simulation and comparing the performance of real teams constructed by real users with simulated teams.
Key findings:
In almost 50% of the games, teams picked randomly performed at par or better than the real teams.
Real teams perform better in games where the skill gap between two teams is much higher, and randomly simulated teams fare better in closely matched teams.
Participants playing with multiple teams and participants playing more games outperform the rest.
Read the full paper here.
Process improvement for government drug procurement in India
There is a glaring problem with drug quality in India. Public data shows that the quality problem is higher for government-procured drugs than for retail procurement. In their new paper, Harleen Kaur, Ajay Shah, and Siddhartha Srivastava argue that there is a need to improve the quality of drugs purchased by the government as a significant fraction of drugs used by the people is government-procured. They analyse the quality criteria used for drug purchases by four Indian states – Rajasthan, Punjab, Bihar, and Gujarat, in three stages of the government contracting process - the pre-qualification stage, tender stage, and award and post-award stage. Their paper finds 11 desirable features and 4 less useful features in the quality-related procurement practices of the four states.
Read the full paper here.
Foundations for nighttime lights data analysis
Nighttime lights captured from satellites is an important way to measure prosperity. Every researcher who uses the files released by NASA and NOAA faces the challenge of pre-processing them in addressing data quality issues. In a new paper, Ayush Patnaik, Ajay Shah, and Susan Thomas introduce an open-source software package, NighttimeLights.jl, which performs cleaning procedures on the VIIRS monthly nighttime lights using statistical methods from the present research frontier. Through this, they solve the problems of entry barriers, non-comparability, and non-reproducibility in using the data.
Read the full paper here.
Delays in government contracting: A tale of two metros
The Indian state attempts to build capacity by identifying lessons from its past shortcomings. In a new article, Anirudh Burman and Pavithra Manivannan test this statement by comparing the procurement processes and outcomes of the Calcutta metro-rail system and the Delhi metro-rail system.
Key findings:
The gap between the estimated date of completion and the actual date of completion was a little more than a year for the Delhi Metro project and close to two decades for the Calcutta Metro project.
In recent years, the Indian state has learned to do procurement better for metro-rail systems.
Three factors are key to enabling desirable procurement outcomes - the institutional design of a procuring entity, its financial structure, and human resource competence.
Read the full article here.
Commentary
In his Business Standard column - Ajay Shah writes about five questions that will shape the world economy in 2023. He emphasizes the importance of the external global environment and developments in the world economy on the Indian economy.
In their new article - Foundations for an Indian JETP, Akshay Jaitly, and Ajay Shah explore the dichotomy between “investment” and “investability” in the domain of Indian climate mitigation. They argue for a focus on “investability” in the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) financing regime.
We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work. Please write to pavithra.manivannan4@gmail.com. To know more about our work visit xkdr.org.