Redefining safety in the era of risk trade-off and sustainability

While the risk level of visible factors has lowered, that of invisible and uncertain factors begin to attract attention, such as climate change triggering large-scale disasters and possible counter-risks arising from emerging technologies. Costs involved in reducing risk have risen considerably and a number of unintended counter-risks have also become apparent. Since the various measures implemented to counter global warming, including geoengineering measures, may lead to an increase in acute or chronic health and safety risks, there exists an urgent need for formulation of a framework for debating different kinds of risks by employing a common platform and expanding it along the spatial and temporal axes. In order to extend the scope of impact assessment with regard to the decision-making process and develop a common approach to risk assessment, the author argues that certain shortfalls need to be addressed, such as those that exist with regard to substances, domains, risks, and benefits, as well as in relation to time and space.     

RETURNS SYSTEM WITH REBATES*

We consider a variant of the newsvendor problem. Atomistic retailers each buy merchandise from a monopoly supplier for resale at a market‐determined common retail price that depends upon the total industry order quantity and upon a stochastic demand. After the orders are filled, the supplier learns the realization of demand but the retailers do not. We show that, in this setting, a returns system with rebates (with previously set buy‐back price for returns and ex post payments from the supplier to each retailer per unit actually sold) implements the optimal production and sales strategy, attaining maximum expected profit in the channel.     

Confidence and the real economy - the Japanese case

This paper empirically analyses whether consumer confidence has an effect on the real economy in Japan. This paper uses vector autoregressions including variables which represent consumer confidence. It is shown that in the cases of quarterly and monthly data, consumer confidence has a significant effect on GDP fluctuations, whereas in the case of semiannual data, it has no effect. In other words, consumer confidence has an effect on only short-term economic fluctuations.     

Global R&D management

Abstract
Global R&D management, the management of company R&D effort distributed over different countries, a task that concerns multinational firms, has not been widely studied. The authors have therefore carried out in-depth studies of global R&D conducted by 7 European and 15 Japanese companies. Their objective was to identify 'best practice' and so construct a framework for future research.
The authors' conclusions are as follows. Globalisation, that is decentralisation of R&D, has become a necessity for multinationals as a result of the localisation of competition, of product life becoming shorter than development time, and the need to locate laboratories near sources of new technological know-how.
Because foreign acquisitions often lead to the acquisition of laboratories, questions are raised about how best to integrate them with the administrative practices of the 'home' organization, whether to reorganize them or to close them down. When it is necessary to set up a new foreign-based laboratory deciding its exact location will require the weighing of factors such as whether the activities are to be market or process oriented, where on the R to D scale the activities will be placed, and how far direction of the laboratory's programmes and work will be decentralised.
Global management also demands special attention to the building of an open communication network among the laboratories, the best form of which has yet to be determined. The main concern in human resource management will be how to select and develop an internationally oriented management corps and how to train R&D professionals to communicate across sites.
If globally dispersed R&D laboratories are to be most effectively used then a new framework for their management needs to be developed.     

Income Tax and Endogenous Business Cycles

This paper investigates the dynamic implication of balanced–budget rules. We introduce public goods to an overlapping generations model with production and assume that public goods in each period are financed by the labor income taxes. We show that in our model, if the cost of providing public goods is financed by lump–sum taxes, endogenous fluctuations would never occur. But in cases where the government adopts proportional taxes, periodic and chaotic equilibria can exist.     

High Price Strategy and Quality Signalling

I investigate a high price strategy by a durable‐goods producer for signalling the high quality of goods. It is assumed that two types of monopolists exist: high‐quality and low‐quality. The monopolist's type is assumed to be unknown to consumers in the first period. Before the beginning of the second period, a product reputation established in the past period enables consumers to recognize the real type of the monopolist. I show that there occurs a signalling equilibrium where the high‐quality type monopolist uses a high price strategy. An interaction between the new and old products peculiar to the durable‐goods markets plays an important role in the pricing strategy.     

Pricing strategy, quality signaling, and entry deterrence

I investigate a pricing strategy that is aimed at deterring entry by applying a two-period model of a durable-goods monopolist. There exists an incumbent that is of two types, that is, high and low quality types. They differ in terms of their R&D capabilities, and the incumbent's type is assumed to be unknown to an entrant. If the entrant decided to enter the market, Nash–Bertrand price competition ensues between the incumbent and the entrant. I show that not only limit pricing but also prestige pricing signals the incumbent's quality type, which serves to discourage entry. In the prestige pricing, the high-quality type sells the products at an intentionally higher price. I also show that although limit pricing is more desirable than prestige pricing from a social welfare viewpoint, the incumbent can still choose prestige pricing.     

Does human capital or physical capital constrain output in Japanese prefectures?

This paper develops a dynamic–network DEA (data envelopment analysis) model where total output is jointly produced from two sectors: a human capital sector and a physical capital sector. Each prefecture produces a final output and an intermediate product which is used to augment future physical capital. The optimization method allows future production possibilities to be enhanced if some final output in the current period is foregone so that larger amounts of the intermediate product can be produced. The goal is to choose the amounts of final output and intermediate product so as to maximize the size of the production possibility set. The method also allows identification of whether output is constrained by a lack of physical capital, a lack of human capital or a lack of both types of capital. We apply our method to 47 Japanese prefectures during the period 2007–2009. A key finding is that a lack of human capital is constraining potential output.     

An economic analysis of Japanese distribution systems

We investigate Japanese distribution systems by using a successive monopoly model in which the dealer can increase demand for the commodity. We compare the Tatene system (TS) with the open price system (OPS), and show that in cases where the dealer's power of sales promotion is small (large), the total profits obtained through TS become larger (smaller) than those of the OPS. This result justifies the actual change from TS to OPS from an economic point of view. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.