Japan's technological strategy

While it is well established that borrowed technology has played an important role in Japan's economic development, the nature of this process needs further clarification. This paper deals with the catching-up hypothesis: that a technological gap between Japan and other industrial countries (primarily the United States) emerged during World War II, but has been narrowing since then. Making a distinction between absorptive and creative R and D, we show that Japan's technological strategy emphasized the former while allowing the gap in the latter to remain.     

Consumer's surplus and income redistribution

In reformulating consumer's surplus analysis, Hicks focused on a single household. The present essay extends the analysis to many households in a manner that seems not yet to have been explored systematically: by integrating consumer's surplus with the social welfare function. This is done in a general, as distinct from the usual partial, equilibrium context. A resulting formula, relating the community's gain from a resource reallocation in a novel way to the associated changes in volume and distribution of income, inclusive of surpluses, may facilitate applications. The analysis may also clarify some recurring issues regarding consumer's surplus.     

An approximate solution to Arrow's problem

We impose a lattice-theoretic structure on a class of social welfare functions, which properly include Arrowian social welfare functions, by ordering their families of decisive sets by set inclusion. We show that this lattice is compactly generated and characterize the completely meet irreducible elements of this lattice. Certain completely meet irreducible elements correspond to Arrowian social welfare functions. Those social welfare functions corresponding to the other completely meet irreducible families of decisive sets are approximate solutions to the problem of social choice as posed by Arrow.     

A variable-production generalisation of Lerner's theorem

A government wishes to choose an optimal set of wage rates, but it is uncertain of individual characteristics. All it knows for certain is that each utility function is strictly quasi-concave and that the production function is linear. We assume that it can determine probability distributions, for each individual. of possible utility functions and ability levels. If each of these probability distributions is the same for every individual, expected social welfare is maximised by equalisation of wage rates. But since actual utility functions, and therefore labour supplies, will generally be unequal, incomes will then be unequal.     

Hotelling's competition with general customer distributions

Hotelling and his critics assumed uniformly distributed demand. In this note the solution is characterized for any distribution F and some propositions follow. For any F an equilibrium does not exist if the duopolists are located too closely together, but another distribution can be always found for which an equilibrium does exist. When we observe duopolies in equilibrium with closer and closer proximity we can expect the density in the area of contention to go up and prices and profits to go down. Hotelling's known suggestion that any duopolist has an advantage to move his location towards the other, and thus creating a tendency for the differentiation to diminish, holds whenever an equilibrium exists.