Electricity saving behavior of households by making efforts,replacing appliances,and renovations: empirical analysis using a multivariate ordered probit model

This study empirically explores the determinants of household electricity saving behavior based on a sample of Japanese households. Our study makes four contributions. First, we examine the short‐term saving action of making efforts, the medium‐term saving action of replacing appliances, and the long‐term saving action of undertaking renovations. Second, we consider not only the physical characteristics of households but also behavioral characteristics, such as their understanding of the importance of energy saving and willingness to save energy. Third, in our analysis, we assume that appliances and housing facilities have the electricity‐saving capability and service‐providing capability. While previous studies focus on the former, consumers in reality consider both capabilities. Fourth, we consider the optimization by households and include broad types of appliances and renovations. Using a multivariate ordered probit model with data on 518 Japanese households in 2012, we obtain the following results. First, in addition to the demand response, the effort level is determined by behavioral, rather than by physical characteristics. Second, the motivation behind appliance replacement is durability, rather than electricity‐saving and service‐providing capabilities. Third, appliance replacement is enhanced by an understanding of the importance of energy saving, rather than by the willingness to save energy. Households can replace appliances because of social pressure, even if they are not so concerned about saving energy. Fourth, households are willing to renovate housing facilities even though they pay a higher cost for the greater saving capability rather than for the service‐providing capability. However, such renovation is not influenced by internal incentives, but by physical aspects of the house, such as size, age, and type.     

Education cost, intergenerational mobility, and income inequality

Using a modified version of the Maoz and Moav [Maoz, Y. D. and Moav, O., 1999. Intergenerational mobility and the process of development. Economic Journal 109(458) 677-697] model, we show that the dynamics of income inequality and intergenerational mobility, and the effects of technological changes on inequality, depend crucially on the share of education cost in income.     

Introduction: New directions in Information and Screening in Real Estate Finance

Conclusion The evidence presented in this special issue supports the view that preexisting information held by mortgage lenders plays an important role in mortgage approvals. This argues for mortgage lending programs that make efficient use of lender information, and it supports the importance of local financial intermediaries for lending. It also suggests that mortgage finance is an important element in turning transitory shocks into persistent ones that shape macroeconomic and regional business cycles.This Journal has from its inception, with the publication of a seminal article on information and incentives on mortgage contract terms by Dunn and Spart (1988), pushed forward the frontier of knowledge on information issues in real estate finance. This special issue presents empirical evidence on the importance of this aspect of mortgages.     

On the determinants of foreign ownership shares: Evidence from US firms' joint ventures in Japan

It is often argued that firms' foreign expansion is motivated by economies of scale in information-based intangible assets. Since these assets are combined with local factors in real production, their owner often has to deal with local factor owners' opportunistic behavior such as siphoning of skills which reduces the return on intangibles to the original owner. Local factor owners' agency behavior can also reduce a subsidiary's profit. Maintaining ownership mitigates the former type of opportunistic behavior, while ceding ownership reduces the latter type. Hence there is a non-linear relationship between ownership and the cost of control. In this paper we present a model that incorporates these aspects of a joint venture ownership. In our model the share in a joint venture of a foreign parent firm with a superior technology is determined such that its marginal cost of control is set equal to the marginal benefit it derives from a joint venture. We assume that, because of the uniqueness and mobility of its intangible factor, the foreign partner has more bargaining power than its local counterpart regarding the ownership of their joint venture and that the local partner is less concerned than its foreign counterpart about the problems of agency and property rights protection because of its geographic and cultural proximity to the joint venture. As a consequence, the foreign partner is able to exert its preference for its ownership share in the joint venture. Our theoretical results allow a decomposition of ownership share into components explained by the cost of control and by the profitability of a joint venture. Our empirical results using data on technology-based US firms' subsidiaries in Japan are consistent with our model predictions. In particular, the fraction of ownership share explained by the cost of control relative to the fraction explained by intrinsic profitability is higher for industries that rely more heavily on intangible assets, as expected from the model.     

Endogenous Market Structures in the Presence of a Socially Responsible Firm

We consider the endogenous selection of strategic contracts in an asymmetric duopoly with substitutable goods. the duopoly comprises a typical managerial firm with a sales delegation and a socially responsible firm (CSR firm) with a linear combination of social welfare and quantity as its managerial delegation contract. In particular, we examine how the equilibrium market structure changes from the case wthere both firms adopt sales delegation contracts to the case wthere one of the firms becomes a CSR firm, after the owners of the firms select their strategic contracts. We show that two market structures that are asymmetric with respect to their strategic contracts can become equilibrium market structures under the pure strategic contract class. Furthermore, we consider a unique mixed strategy equilibrium to examine how the risk domination between the two asymmetric equilibrium market structures affects equilibrium selection. there, we find that the competition wthere the firm with the sales delegation and the CSR firm have a price contract and a quantity contract, respectively, risk-dominates the competition wthere the firms have a quantity contract and a price contract, respectively. Finally, by deriving the order of social welfare among the four subgames, we show that the social incentive does not coincide with the private incentive in the robust equilibrium with respect to risk domination in the endogenous selection game of the strategic contracts of the asymmetric duopoly with the firm with a sales delegation and the CSR firm.     

Endogenous timing in a mixed duopoly: price competition with managerial delegation

We introduce a managerial delegation contract into the mixed duopoly model and examine its influence on price setting in a mixed duopoly in the context of the endogenous‐timing problem. We obtain the result that owners of a public and a private firm prefer to delay the setting of the prices of their products as much as possible. Thus, in equilibrium, the firms choose their prices simultaneously in the latter stage of the game. This is in contrast to the findings of the entrepreneurial case, according to which firms choose prices simultaneously in the former stage. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PRINTEPS: An Integrated Intelligent Application Development Platform based on Stream Reasoning and ROS

Although AI and service robot applications have become very popular in many domains recently, many of them are specific applications and it is still difficult to develop integrated intelligent applications such as a robot teahouse and teaching assistant robots. To develop such integrated intelligent applications, we need integrated intelligent application platforms that have AI integration and agile process facilities. From the above background, we are currently developing PRactical INTElligent aPplicationS (PRINTEPS), which is a platform for developing integrated intelligent applications by combining only five types of modules, namely knowledge-based reasoning, spoken dialogue, image sensing, motion management, and machine learning. This paper proposes a workflow editor in PRINETPS based on a service-oriented architecture and a Robot Operating System that enables real-time parallel processing for multiple robots and sensors by integrating the five types of modules. The editor also supports not only developers but also domain experts in updating workflows frequently. This paper also proposes a novel method to integrate signals acquired through image sensing with knowledge (ontologies and business rules) using C-SPARQL and Semantic Web Rule Language. To evaluate PRINTEPS, we developed a robot teahouse application including customer reception and guidance to table services using a humanoid robot with PRINTEPS. Through this case study, we demonstrated that the behaviors of the robot can be modified by changing the workflow, the ontology, and the rules.