Beyond the personal–anonymous divide: agency relations in powers of attorney in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Powers of attorney are often interpreted as evidence of trust among the parties involved. We build a novel dataset of notarized powers of attorney, capturing a wide variety of agency relationships in four large French commercial cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to test hypotheses on the relational basis of economic relationships. We find little support for the idea of a radical shift from personal to anonymous relationships during our period. Our results point to more nuanced transformations. The preference for proxies in the same occupation as the principal somewhat declined, while professional proxies emerged and principals used relational chains, especially involving notaries, to find proxies.     

Licensing vs. Litigation: The Effect of the Legal System on Incentives to Innovate

With uncertain scope of patent protection and imperfect enforcement, the effective strength of patent protection is determined by the legal system. We analyze how the legal system affects the incentives of firms to innovate, taking into account possibilities of strategic licensing and litigation to deter imitation. The legal system that guarantees the patentee's monopoly power maximizes the R&D intensities. However, the legal system that induces licensing provides incentives to exert R&D effort while preserving ex post efficiency. We also compare R&D, patent licensing, and litigation behavior under American and English rules of legal cost allocation.     

Dispersion of growth paths of macroeconomic models in thermodynamic limits: two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet models

This paper discusses dispersion of growth patterns of macroeconomic models in thermodynamic limits. More specifically, the paper shows that the coefficients of variations of the total numbers of clusters and the numbers of clusters of specific sizes of one- and two-parameter Poisson–Dirichlet models behave qualitatively differently in the thermodynamic limits. The coefficients of variations of the numbers of clusters in the former class of distributions are all self-averaging, while the those in the latter class are all non-self averaging. In other words, dispersions or variations of growth rates about the means do not vanish in the two-parameter version of the model, while they do in the one-parameter version in the thermodynamic limits. The paper ends by pointing out other models, such as triangular urn models, may converge to Mittag–Leffler distributions which exhibit non-self-averaging behavior for certain parameter combinations. The author is grateful for many helps he received from H. Yoshikawa, and M. Sibuya.     

Stock Prices and the Real Economy: Power Law versus Exponential Distributions

This paper explores the relationship between the stock prices and the real economy. The standard approach – the so called consumption-based asset pricing model – attempts to explain it based on the assumption of the representative agent. In this paper, we argue that the representative agent assumption is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on the recent advancement of “econophysics” on financial markets See Mantegna and Stanley (An Introduction to econophysics: correlations and complexity in finance, 2000) for the introduction to econophysics, we argue that in contrast to the neoclassical view, there is in fact a wedge between financial markets, the stock prices in particular, and the real economy.     

Information, Incentives, and Option Value: The Silicon Valley Model

This paper analyzes the Silicon Valley model as a novel economic institution in the domain of technological product system innovation. We analyze the informational relationship as well as governance relationships between venture capitalists and a cluster of entrepreneurial firms. The informational conditions that make the Silicon Valley model efficient are identified, leading to an understanding of the significance of standardized interfaces, modularization, and information encapsulation. We then examine the governance/incentive aspect by integrating the models of Aoki (Towards a Comparative Institutional Analysis, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) and Baldwin and Clark (Design Rules—Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). The paper concludes by evaluating the applicability of the model to other localities and industries. J. Comp. Econ., December 2002, 30(4), pp. 759–786. Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, and RIETI, 1-3-1 Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0013, Japan; and Faculty of Economics, Toyo University, 5-28-20 Hakusan, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112-8606, Japan. © 2002 Association for Comparative Economic Studies. Published by Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D21, L23, O32, P51, P52.     

Differentiated Standards and Patent Pools

We consider patent pool formation by owners of essential patents for differentiated standards that may be complements or substitutes in use. Pooling improves coordination in terms of royalty setting within a standard but provokes a strategic response from licensors in the competing standard. We characterise the incentives to form and defect from pools within standards and show how pool formation and stability depend on competition between standards. We also examine strategic patent pool formation by consortium standards and show that policies promoting compatibility of standards may increase or decrease welfare depending on the effects on the incentives to form pools.     

Managerialism revisited in the light of bargaining-game theory

This lecture proposes to view the modern firm as a coalition of shareholders, employees, and business partners, rather than to identify it with a single maximizer such as an entrepreneur. This view may be thought of as a revival of the original thought of managerialism, but tries to go further by analyzing implications of the interactions of those agents on the behavior of the firm in a bargaining-game theoretic framework. The lecture reviews the literature on game theoretic approaches to the theory of the firm, and discusses a few important theoretical and institutional issues.     

Whither Japanese keiretsu? The transformation of vertical keiretsu in Toyota,Nissan and Honda 1991–2011

Drawing on institutional theory, this paper discusses the transformation of vertical keiretsu in the Japanese automotive industry from 1991 to 2011. By investigating the cases of Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, the paper empirically contributes to the debate on whither the Japanese economy is heading. Long-standing relationships to suppliers and exclusiveness have changed significantly in Nissan, while remaining stable in Toyota and Honda. New competition-based elements and more open support systems have been added to earlier governance mechanisms such as power and anshin (security). We argue that the studied keiretsu since the 1990s follows diverse and complex trajectories of hybridization, and we suggest that the Japanese economy is developing similarly.     

洛阳“一五”时期苏式住宅街坊考察与改造探索

以洛阳"一五"时期建造的苏式住宅为研究对象,阐述了其建造的历史,分析了整体的建筑风格特色,并对其现状进行调查研究,探讨了典型街坊改造更新的措施和方法,力求平衡历史街区的保护与社会经济发展,使历史遗产得以永续保存。