Purpose – Today, it is becoming increasingly important for manufacturers to develop cooperative relationships with distributors and obtain customized distribution services. Previous research has suggested that, with specified assets, manufacturers might “hold up” distributors and that such...

This paper examines the agglomeration effects of multinational firms on the location decisions of first-time Japanese manufacturing investors in China for the period 1995-2007. This is accomplished by exploiting newly constructed measures of inter-firm backward and forward linkages formed in a...

This paper provides a new non-renewable resource extraction model with both extraction and exploration technologies. We show how these technological changes affect efficient non-renewable resource extraction differently. Policy-makers therefore need to carefully choose the type of technology by...

This paper suggests a hypothesis that feelings of attachment change subjective valuation through reference point shifts. This attachment hypothesis can explain seemingly contradictory results of recent experiments concerning what are called endowment effects, in which there exists disparities of...

This paper develops three bodies of analysis. First, I examine the bilateral estimation of income yields from financial assets in 10 OECD countries. There are three kinds of assets: debt, portfolio equity, and FDI. I found that Finland, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. have large advantages of...

Metzler functions arise in various kinds of system optimization problems such as the stable matching of two-sided markets and the α-cores of games with punishment-dominance relations. In this paper, we discuss the shortest-path problem as an application of the theory of Metzler functions. We...