Anchor stores

Planned shopping malls usually have one or more department (anchor) stores and multiple specialized retailers selling substitutable commodities in each commodity category. If consumers know their taste for the anchor's commodity and its price, but learn about a retailer's commodity only by costly search, collocation may benefit both store types. Intra-mall competition reduces markups, but anchors guarantee a minimum surplus from search. A mall with many retailers makes finding a suitable specialized commodity highly probable. For some parameters, additional consumer search dominates the loss in retail markups, so a profit-maximizing land developer would rent mall space to both store types.     

The needs of Japanese industry and engineering education

Japan experienced a miraculous reconstruction after the second world war partly due to the far-sighted support of the victors, especially the United States, and China, who did not divide the country or demand reparations, and partly due to the unique inherent qualities of the Japanese people.The Japanese race has developed its national identity from a combination of the country's location, climate and the circumstances of its some 1000 year history. As a result the people of Japan are truly a single race, for the most part uniform in experience, culture and language with a strong domestic orientation. From an educational viewpoint, the Japanese are historically good learners. However, they are traditionally bad when it comes to generating new ideas by applying theory for creative purposes.A simple process of (1) follow, (2) catch up and (3) equal or surpass describes the development of the high-tech industry in Japan. This process has made the most of the Japanese people's ability to absorb information as well as their single-minded determination to achieve goals and their propensity for concentrated effort. As the automobile and semi-conductor industries illustrate, the Japanese have unequalled expertise when it comes to adopting technology from advanced industrial nations overseas, perfecting it and making it their own.The challenge for the Japanese people, now that the catch-up process is all but completed, is to continue their progress by generating their own innovative ideas. In addition, the Japanese must develop a more global orientation and consider the needs of foreign markets in new product development. This evolution must take place in an atmosphere of international sharing, co-operation and partnership.In terms of education, the traditional good learner with a domestic orientation must be taught how to be a good original thinker with an international viewpoint.The engineering system in Japan has been placed against this background and is examined from both an historic and a futuristic perspective.     

Partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering

This paper analyzes the optimal partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering policies in a model with electoral competitions in policy positions and transfer promises. Party leaders have both office‐ and policy‐motivations. With complete freedom in redistricting, partisan gerrymandering policy generates the most one‐sidedly biased district profile, while bipartisan gerrymandering generates the most polarized district profile. In contrast, with limited freedom in gerrymandering, both partisan and bipartisan gerrymandering tend to prescribe the same policy.     

Institutional Economics as Theory of Policy Change: Impact of Past Policy Failures on Present Policy

Social scientists have developed several theories for understanding or evaluating policy change over time. Since all costs or benefits are not internalized owing to positive transaction costs, policymaking is always implemented under cost underestimation conditions and, therefore, is imperfect. I call this trait policy failure in this article. Furthermore, I show that a new framework combining the social costs approach and the legal/economic approach in institutional economics is suitable and can be applied to evaluating how past policy failures affect present policy, providing as an example the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.     

Testing for negativity in a demand system: A Bayesian approach

The paper introduces Bayesian inference into a demand model. This allows us to test for the negativity condition of the substitution matrix which is difficult to handle directly in the traditional approach. To illustrate the Bayesian inference procedures, we estimate the Rotterdam model and test the demand properties using Japanese data. The empirical results show the importance of specifically considering negativity in demand analysis. First version received: September 1997/final version received: February 1998     

Necessary conditions for admissibility of matrix linear estimators in a multivariate linear model

This article provides necessary conditions for the admissibility of matrix linear estimators of an estimable parameter matrix linear function under two kinds of quadratic matrix loss functions in a multivariate linear model following a family of matrix normal distributions, where the covariance matrix associated is completely unknown. Further it is demonstrated that if a more concrete condition supplied for one of the subdivided conditions is satisfied, then the special condition concerning the Stein problem is necessary for the admissibility of the kind of estimators under each of the loss functions.     

Existence of steady – state equium in an overlapping-generations model with production

Summary This paper establishes an existence theorem of a non-trivial (positive capital stock) steady-state equilibrium in Diamond's (1965) overlapping-generations model with production by employing the steady-state consumption curve introduced in Ihori (1978). The assumptions on preferences and production technologies that ensure the existence of a nontrivial steadystate equilibrium are separated from each other, unlike in Galor and Ryder (1989). We also provide two simple examples which illustrate the importance of two conditions in the theorem.Detailed comments by Tomoichi Shinotsuka and the referees of the journal were quite helpful. We also thank Marcus Berliant, Mark Bus, John H. Boyd III, Ban Chuan Cheah, Rajat Deb, Jim Dolmas, Oded Galor, Greg Huffman, Toshihiro Ihori, Radhika Lahiri, Lionel McKenzie, Arundhati Sen, and the seminar participants at the Midwest Mathematical Economics Conference in Ann Abor and at University of Rochester. The second author gratefully acknowledges the financial supports from the European Community Human Capital Mobility Program.     

Concentration of competing retail stores

The geographical concentration of stores that sell similar commodities is analyzed using a two-dimensional spatial competition model. A higher concentration of stores attracts more consumers with taste uncertainty and low price expectations (a market-size effect), while it leads to fiercer price competition (a price-cutting effect). Our model is general enough to allow for the coexistence of multiple (possibly) asymmetric clusters of stores. We provide sufficient conditions for the nonemptiness of equilibrium store location choices in pure strategies. Through numerical examples, we illustrate the trade-off between the market-size and price-cutting effects, and provide agglomeration patterns of stores in special cases.