Interdependent bank runs under a collapsing fixed exchange rate regime

This paper provides a framework for simultaneous multiple bank runs in a country experiencing a currency crisis. The correlation of bank runs increases as the proportion of debts from foreign creditors (indexed to the dollar) to domestic creditors (indexed to the domestic currency) increases. Moreover, when the share of dollar debt is sufficiently high, this interlinkage is perfect; that is, runs occur in all banks or not at all. Consequently, a situation exists where even a solvent bank cannot borrow in the interbank market. These findings imply that as the domestic banking sector becomes increasingly dependent on dollar debt, there is a heightened requirement for dollar reserves and a lender-of-last-resort facility.     

Determining the optimal scheme of zoned effluent charges for the control of air pollution

A minimum costly zoned effluent charge program for the control of air pollution is considered paying attention to the general situation where polluters' cost functions of treating pollutant are unknown to the policy authority, and an iterative procedure by which the authority can attain a set of optimal charges is presented. The algorithm consists of steps of estimating the unknown treatment cost functions by observing polluter behavior and steps of revising charges based on the estimated cost functions. In the latter steps, a newly developed solution procedure for the zoned charge programming problem is involved. Simulated use of the algorithm indicates that the iterative charge revision procedure proposed in this paper can effectively provide the optimal scheme of zoned effluent charges.     

Integrating Smart Glasses with Question-Answering Module in Assistant Work Environment

Recently, smart glasses have been applied in the field of maintenance, with which a worker goes well during work by contacting a support operator from a remote location. The worker, however, cannot go well if the support operator is not there. To solve the issues, this paper discusses how a work system should be developed by integrating smart glasses with a question-answering module. We design the work knowledge acquired from skilled people and manuals as a workflow for when type of question, rule base for how, goal tree for why, domain ontologies, and its RDF data for what. Workers can receive answers from the question-answering module incorporated with multiple knowledge bases for four types of question. The authors conducted a demonstration experiment and found that workers could perform the work more autonomously by importing the system.     

日本农业协同组织的发展新动向与面临的挑战——日本案例和对中国农民专业合作社的启示

日本农业协同组织已经有100多年的历史并具备一定的规模,从事的业务种类繁多,成员也从农民会员扩大到非农民会员,近年来也面临新问题与挑战.本文主要介绍了日本农民协会管理理念与模式、经营业务以及近几年所面临的问题,从而为正在发展中的中国农民专业合作社提供参考.     

A Pricing Strategy with Consumption Externality when the Reference Group is Large

This paper provides an analysis of firms’ optimal prices when individual utility exhibits both material and other consumer effects. We construct a model and conduct an analysis in the following four steps: (1) By using a conjoint analysis of data, we set up a hierarchical Bayesian model and estimate its parameters, which are composed of individual utility functions. (2) We calculate the number of sales in each time period and derive the total sales throughout the given period. (3) We estimate the demand functions in the presence and absence of consumption externalities. (4) Finally, we calculate the profit functions and derive the optimal prices taking into account various product attributes. By applying our analysis to the book market of Japan, we find that the optimal price is lower when an externality is present than when absent. The intuition behind this result is that pricing low and selling a large number of books from an early stage increases the externality effect, yielding a higher profit for firms.     

Evaluating shifts in Japan's quality-of-life

This paper presents a Data Envelopment Analysis/Malmquist index (DEA/MI) analysis of the change in quality-of-life (QOL), which is defined as the state of a social system as measured by multiple social-indicators. Applying panel data from Japan's 47 prefectures for the period 1975–2002, we identify significant movement in the country's overall QOL using a “cumulative” frontier shift index. Results suggest that Japan's QOL rose during the so-called “bubble economy years” (second half of the 1980s), and then dropped in the succeeding “lost-decade” (1990s). We also identify those prefectures considered most “responsible” for the shift(s) in QOL. Moreover, the use of both upper- and lower-bound DEAs enabled an evaluation of both “good” and “bad” movements in QOL.