Following the collapse of the Japanese financial bubble during the 1990s, Japanese corporations came to be saddled with increasingly large underfunded pension obligations. The gap between the level of retirement benefit promised and the market performance of retirement funds widened alarmingly,...

This paper investigates the empirical determinants of the initial FDI entry decisions by Japanese firms to enter into the U.S and Taiwanese markets. The study is based on a full-sample survey of firms listed on Japanese stock exchanges and is for the period 1976-2000. We find that a number of...

At present, Vietnam is regarded as the most notorious country regarding copyright infringement. China, joining WTO in 2001, has since implemented strict copyright measures. Even though Vietnam has laws covering intellectual property rights, enforcement is almost non-existent. We investigated how...

This paper considers how optimal copyright enforcement is affected by the development of those media industries promoting musicians. Accounting for situations in both developing and developed countries, we point out two cases, a strictly convex and a strictly concave profit function with respect...

This paper considers situations in which social networks expand on the web. These are sustained through content produced by individual agents. An incentive for such production is utility stemming from others' viewings. Whether a network is expansible or not depends on marginal utilities from...

This paper considers privacy invasion resulting from map services, such as Street View, on the Internet. Reciprocal privacy invasion can develop into a Prisoners' Dilemma. A portal site remedies such a dilemma by supplying personal information. However, under excessive supply, it worsens agents'...

A growing middle-income class in developing and emerging countries has creating new demand for travels to foreign countries. In spite of a new coronavirus, this phenomenon will not stop in the long run. Selection of specific destinations is apparently influenced by an interest in foreign...

As an alternative to the current copyright system (FLC), indefinitely renewable copyright (IRC) has not been compared to the current system in international settings. We compare them in a two country setting. We find that optimally configured IRC does not necessarily lead to higher national or...

This paper considers the behaviors of homepage creators who supply as well as demand content on the Internet while facing content competition. The Internet makes possible an aspect we have not experienced with communication tools as telephone, radio, and TV. We present three propositions. The...