Strategic Policy and Environmental Quality: Helping the Domestic Industry to Provide Credible Information

This paper shows that a country can improve an industry's competitiveness by requiring domestic firms to produce at the environmental standards at which they claim to produce or otherwise impose a penalty on those firms found cheating. Competitiveness will improve because this regulation will help the domestic industry to provide credible information about the environmental quality of its production. The credible information will differentiate domestic products from other products on the world market, and in this way increase consumers' willingness to pay for domestic products. Even if the government has no preferences for environmental quality, it has incentives to regulate its cheaters in order to help the domestic industry to provide credible information and thereby improve competitiveness.     

Social Norms and Private Provision of Public Goods

The formation of social norms for voluntary contributions to a public good is analyzed in a game in which people have preferences for private consumption, a public good, and social approval. Each person chooses to be one of the two types: a contributor or a non‐contributor. Thereafter, each person meets people who can observe his type. A non‐contributor feels disapproval, whereas a contributor feels approval if he believes that a contributor observes his type. The game has two asymptotically stable states: one in which everybody is a contributor, and one in which nobody is a contributor. Governmental subsidization of the public good can move the society to the former state, whereas a governmental contribution to the public good can move the society to the latter. Indeed, this crowding in or crowding out prevails even after policy reversal.     

Issues in the Design of Facilitated Collaboration Processes

Groups often rely on the expertise of facilitators to support them in their collaboration processes. The design and preparation of a collaboration process is an important facilitation task. Although there is a significant body of knowledge about the effects of facilitation, there is a dearth of knowledge about the ways in which facilitators design collaboration processes. Increased understanding in this area will contribute to the effective design and use of collaboration support and to the development of collaboration process design support. The research reported in this paper explores the strategies and techniques facilitators use to design a collaboration process, and the aspects of this task they perceive as challenging. We present the results of a questionnaire among professional facilitators. We compare facilitators with different expertise levels to identify challenges in the design of collaboration processes. We discovered that although the activities performed and information used by novices is not very different from expert practices, their limited experience makes them less flexible. When the actual session brings surprises such as different outcomes or conflict, novices cannot easily adapt their designs to accommodate these.     

Using managers' expectations for ex-ante policy evaluation: Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

Evaluation of the impacts of government policies during an economic crisis is often delayed until the outcomes are realized. Policies can be better guided if they can be evaluated amid a crisis, before the realization of outcomes. This study examines whether survey data on the expectations of small business managers can help evaluate two high-stake subsidies for firms amid the COVID-19 crisis in Japan, namely, Subsidy Program for Sustaining Businesses (SPSB) and Employment Adjustment Subsidy (EAS). We evaluate the accuracy of managers' expectations, estimate the impact of subsidies on the expected firm survival, and compare it with the estimated impact on realized survival. We find that the managers' expectations on their future sales, survival rate, and the possibility of receiving these subsidies predict the realized outcomes, although they were highly pessimistic about their survival rates. We find that the estimated impacts of the SPSB on the expected survival rates have the same sign as the estimated impact on the realized survival rates, but the size is more than twice because of the pessimism on survival. The estimated impacts of the EAS are both insignificant. Therefore, although its impact may be overestimated, managers' expectations are useful for selecting an effective policy.