In this paper, the author first briefly discuss the structure of Japan's public pension system, the history of that system, the raison d'etre of a public pension sustem, some of the defects in the current system, the origins of those defects, possible ways of alleviating those defects, future...

In this paper, we analyze a variety of data on saving motives, bequest motives, and bequest division from the "Comparative Survey of Savings in Japan and the United States", a binational survey conducted in 1996 by the Institute for Posts and Telecommunications Policy of the Ministry of Posts...

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...

The title of this monograph could have been "What does one do if Anything Goes"; a friend suggested that I should use it as a sub-title instead of the more prosaic one that I have used. There are two basic "Anything Goes" type of results which influence the role of dynamics in economic theory....

This paper analyzes platforms and rejections in two-sided markets with network externalities, using the specific context of a payment card association. We study the cooperative antitrust determination of the interchange fee by member banks. We use a framework in which banks and merchants may...

We consider individual's portfolio selection problems. Introducing the concept of ambiguity, we show the existence of portfolio inertia under the assumptions that decision maker's beliefs are captured by an inner measure, and that her preferences are represented by the Choquet integral with...

We analyze two well-known matching mechanisms\the Gale-Shapley, and the Top Trading Cycles (TTC) mechanisms\in theexperimental lab in three different informational settings, and study the role of information in individual decision making. Our results suggest that\in line with the theory\in the...

AT&T was known for both funding a world-class research lab and delaying deployment of useful innovations from the lab. To explain this behavior we consider a model with an incumbent facing a potential entrant. The incumbent can choose from two technologies for production: old and new. The...