We review the facts pertaining to some recent antimonopoly cases in Japan involving interference with unauthorized imports, so-called parallel imports, and propose economic explanations for the behavior of the foreign manufacturers in these cases. Japan's intellectual property law provides a...

A measure of number of steps in the wholesale distribution chain is proposed and calculated for Japan, the United States, and Germany and for different kinds of business within Japan and within the United States. Economic factors that influence the number of wholesale steps in the distribution...

Sellers confront problems of strategy in deciding whether to maintain reputations for supplying high-quality goods or low-quality goods. In a spatial competition model an incumbent monopolist deters entry by maintaining a high reputation. But in a model based on differences in consumers' tastes,...

Wholesalers enter distribution channels to capitalize on their private information about demand and supply. The channels become long only when such private information is valuable. In this article, we document the close link between wholesalers' private information and length of the marketing...

Manufacturers and retailers will often have information about future demand that is not known to the other. Efficiency requires that each member of the distribution channel has an appropriate incentive either to act on its private information or to reveal it to the other members. If a...

We attempt to answer the question of what circumstances help bring about a long-term relationship. By a model analysis we demonstrate that a long-term relationship prevails when the cost-cutting effect of relation-specific resources is considerable, variance in demand is small, consumers are...

Economic theories of information gathering, strategic behavior, opportunism, and response to externalities afford logical interpretations of various marketing phenomena.

Consumers gather information about quality either by prepurchase investigationâsearch, or by actual trial consumptionâexperience. Search is more likely for goods bought infrequently, or for which search costs are low, or the quality is highly uncertain. Experience is more likely under the...