This paper presents data from experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries.

This paper analyzes the revenue-constrained optimum tariff problem. When a fixed level of tax revenue has to be collected only from tariffs, an efficient resource allocation can not be achieved by any tariff structure. Thus we need to find the optimum tariff structure as the second best resource...

In this paper, we conduct a U.S.- Japan comparison of the importance of retirement saving and of the determinants thereof using micro data from the "U.S.- Japan Comparison Survey of Saving," a binational household survey conducted in 1996 by the Institute for Posts and Telecommunications Policy...

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...

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...