A fair housing audit is an important tool for measuring racial and ethnic discrimination in housing market, so they are widely used for policy purposes in the U.S. Each audit consists of a visit to a real estate agent by a minority individual and a majority individual with equal qualification....

Nakagawa(2001) and Nakagawa(2002) applies a fair housing audit technique to age discrimination in Japanese rental housing market, using data from the 2001 Osaka Audits. However, the experimental design of the study had some problems to be improved, e.g. lacked generality. This paper reports the...

A fair housing audit is an important tool for measuring racial and ethnic discrimination in housing market, so they are widely used for policy purposes in the U.S. Each audit consists of a visit to a real estate agent by a minority individual and a majority individual with equal qualification....

We examine auction data to determine if bid rigging presents in procurement auctions for paving works in Ibaraki City, Osaka, Japan. We first show that sporadic bidding wars are caused by the participation of potential "outsiders." Assuming that the ring is all-inclusive if the auction is not...

This paper examines empirically some of the reasons why Japanese manufacturing firms frequently fail to satisfy concavity conditions of the cost function. We focus on the "bubble period" in the 1980s when land was in great demand for reasons related to both production and speculation, and land...

This paper investigates an asymmetric duopoly model with a Hotelling line. We find that helping a small (minor) firm can reduce both social and consumer surplus. This makes a sharp contrast to existing works showing that helping minor firms can reduce social surplus but always improves consumer...

We consider a gtenure-clock problemh in which a principal may set a deadline by which she needs to evaluate an agent's ability and decides whether to promote him or not. We embed this problem in a continuous-time model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must...

This study constructs a model of anticompetitive exclusive contracts in the presence of complementary inputs. A downstream firm transforms multiple complementary inputs into final products. When complementary input suppliers have market power, upstream competition within a given input market...

Using a monthly survey, this paper finds that supporters of the governing cabinet are significantly happier than non-supporters throughout our sample period. We investigate the reason and examine two hypotheses: 1) happy persons support the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and 2) supporters of...

We study the problem of choosing prize winners from among a group of experts when each expert nominates another expert for the prize. A nomination rule determines the set of winners on the basis of the profile of nominations; the rule is impartial if one's nomination never influences one's own...