Volume 7 2000

Authors Index

Volume 7 2000     

Vickrey allocation rule with income effect

We consider situations in which a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. In this paper, we establish that on domains that include nonquasi-linear preferences—preferences exhibiting income effects—an allocation rule that satisfies Pareto-efficiency, strategy-proofness, individual rationality, and nonnegative payment uniquely exists, which is the Vickrey allocation rule. H. Saitoh is a JSPS Research Fellow.     

Legal centralization and the birth of the secular state

This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal central- ization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model based on the mathematics of mixture distributions which delineates the conditions under which legal centralization raises the costs faced by states of setting a narrow standard of orthodox belief. We compare the results of the model with historical evidence drawn from two important cases in which religious diversity and state centralization collided in France: the Albigensian crusades of the thirteenth century and the rise of Protestant belief in the sixteenth century.     

UNIFIED CHINA AND DIVIDED EUROPE

This article studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that a severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered centralization in China, whereas Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained fragmented. Political centralization in China led to lower taxation and hence faster population growth during peacetime compared to Europe. But it also meant that China was more vulnerable to occasional negative population shocks. Our results are consistent with historical evidence of warfare, capital city location, tax levels, and population growth in both China and Europe.     

Negotiating Complex Contracts

Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.     

The Determinants of the Location of Foreign Direct Investment by Japanese Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Japanese manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have actively undertaken Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Asia since the mid-1980s. FDI contributes to economic growth of the FDI recipient countries, as it brings in not only financial resources for investment but also technologies and managerial know-how, which are important factors for promoting economic growth. Recognizing these benefits of receiving FDI, policy makers in developing countries have formulated various strategies to attract FDI. This paper examines the factors in the host countries that would attract FDI by Japanese SMEs. Our results show the importance of both supply-side and demand-side factors in the recipient countries for attracting FDI by Japanese SMEs. Supply-side factors include abundance of low-wage labor, availability of well-developed infrastructure, and good governance of the host government, while an important demand-side factor is the presence of sizable local market. In addition, Japanese SMEs regard industrial agglomeration, which has a element of both supply and demand factors, as an important factors making FDI decision. Supply-side factors are found to be important for attracting Japanese FDI in developing countries, while demand-factors play a role in attracting Japanese FDI in developed countries. A comparison of the results for SMEs to those for large firms reveals that SMEs are more sensitive to the conditions in the host countries in making their FDI decision. In particular, SMEs regard the availability of low-wage labor, well-developed infrastructure, and industrial agglomeration as important elements much more than large firms. High sensitivity of SMEs to local economic conditions in their decision on FDI location may be explained by their limited availability of financial and human resources and high dependence on overseas production in their business. In light of these findings, we conclude that countries interested in hosting FDI have to provide a very attractive business environment.     

What is the Value of Luxury? A Cross‐Cultural Consumer Perspective

International luxury businesses are challenged by the identification and satisfaction of the common needs and desires of global market segments. Although luxury goods have become available to a wider range of consumers, the traditional conspicuous consumption model has been transformed into a new experiential luxury sensibility that is marked by a change in the way that consumers define luxury. Based on an empirical study in collaboration with American, European, and Asian researchers, the results provide evidence that consumers in various parts of the world purchase or wish to purchase luxury products for varied reasons but that such consumers generally possess similar values. Regardless of their countries of origin, the basic motivational drivers of luxury consumers are similar among the financial, functional, personal, and social dimensions of luxury value perceptions, although the relative importance of these dimensions varies.     

Facebook e-Portfolios for Career Education Focused on Japanese Employment Practice: A Case Study

The authors propose the effectiveness of Facebook functions in the promotion of career education. In recent years, career education in Japanese universities has differed slightly from that in other countries. Japanese students are trained to be competitive in the job-hunting process; they need to obtain the technical skills and knowledge necessary to pass a company entrance examination or a university oral interview. This practice is in stark contrast with the intrinsic meaning of vocational/career education, which is the process by which students acquire the abilities and independence required by a certain industry. This meaning is manifested in the purpose of the career education program of Hokkai-Gakuen University’s Faculty of Business Administration. The program’s purpose is to foster independence in its students rather than the acquisition of skills for the job-hunting process. The professional independence of every student is important to their career development after graduating from the university. On the other hand, it is known that e-portfolios generally encourage students to record and assess their activities. To promote the activities that students tackle in the program, we introduced an e-portfolio using Facebook. This study shows the characteristics and achievements of our e-portfolio.     

A Bayesian estimation of macro and micro CES production functions

The paper presents a Bayesian estimation of CES production functions. The proposed estimation method is easier to use than methods so far developed and it allows a direct comparison with the maximum likelihood estimator. A Bayesian highest posterior density interval inference is made to examine the validity of the Cobb–Douglas representation. The method is applied to Japanese macro data and to micro data on two Japanese manufacturing plants. The results indicate that the current practice of employing the Cobb–Douglas form a priori ought to be corrected. In addition, the micro data present results paradoxical to the commonly held view of capital intensity.