This paper examines the role of dual sourcing (e.g., outside options) in vertical and horizontal relations. In a bilateral monopoly market, if either the upstream or downstream firm has outside options, the other firm could lose from seemingly positive shocks, e.g., market expansion or...

This paper examines international trade in tainted food and other low-quality products. Wefirst find that for a large class of environments, free trade is the trading system that conveysthe highest incentives to produce non-tainted high-quality goods by foreign exporters.However, free trade...

This paper examines the relationship between firms' productivity improvement and the volume of exports, and shows that it can be sometimes negative. Specifically, we simultaneously take into account intermediate retailers (i.e., vertically) and multimarket linkages (i.e., horizontally). We find...

This paper examines how impatience interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households (i.e., with intrinsic inequality), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households; (ii)...

This paper examines the role of outside options in a downstream duopoly with exclusive vertical relations as in the Japanese automobile industry. In our setup, the downstream firms have outside options, and two upstream firms with exclusive relations can engage in cost reducing investments. More...

We consider a bilateral monopoly with a supplier and a buyer. Their trading terms are determined through negotiations, but affected by the buyer's efforts to search for outside suppliers. We find surprisingly that a market expansion may harm the supplier.

The regional specialization via differences in transport costs are observed in Japanese manufacturing industries. Concretely, industries with high transport costs for their products, such as iron and steel, petroleum and coal products, remained close to the core region while industries with low...

The "home market effect" (HME) is an essential topic of the new trade theory. Assuming the transport costs only for the manufacturing goods, Krugman (1980) shows that the country with bigger market size is a net exporter. The assumption of free transport of the agricultural good was shown...

This paper examines a new economic geography model with multiple (three) industries and urban costs. The industries are asymmetric in their transport costs. The following results were obtained. First, if transport costs sufficiently decrease whereas commuting costs are constant, we have three...