Groves-Ledyard (1977) constructed a mechanism attaining Pareto efficient allocations in the presence of public goods. After this path-breaking paper, many mechanisms have been proposed to attain desirable allocations with public goods. Thus, economists have thought that the free-rider problem is...

Economic theory predicts that it is impossible to have cooperation in finitely repeated games such as a prisoner's dilemma game without communication. In an experiment on a voluntary participation game with a non-excludable public good that is a version of a Hawk-Dove game, we obderved that...

The EU proposal on the quantity restraint of the emissions trading in the Kyoto Protocol aims at reducing the so called hot air that would be generated by the purchase of emissions permits sold by a country whose actual emissions are much lower than the assigned amount. In this paper we show...

This paper studies public good provision in the laboratory using voluntary contribution mechanism, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan.

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...