To disentangle the relations between standards, innovation and competition, this paper examined the processes and effects of standardization in Japanese firms. The realities of their activities were provided by a postal questionnaire sent to progressive large firms in Japanese industries....

In this paper, we construct a partial equilibrium model of a product that can be manufactured by using a recycled material as well as a virgin natural resource. In particular, we consider the possibility that a household may resort to the illicit disposal of its waste, such as midnight dumping,...

In order to cope with the increasing scarcity of final dump sites for household wastes, the UK recently introduced an environmental policy targeted at the firms that produce and sell products that generate packaging wastes. This policy requires such businesses to hold predetermined numbers of...

Which is better off for the patentee to license its technology by fixed fee or unit royalties? Kamien and Tauman [8] showed that the fixed fee scheme brings greater private value of the patent in the linear model. We extend their analysis into a general model. Then, the simple fact that the...

How does the establishment of new university educational programs promote university-industry joint research? To study this question for the fields of life sciences and biotechnology, we first compile the data on the establishment of new undergraduate and graduate programs in these fields in...

External shocks, be they political or economic, can pose a significant threat to the sustainability of a monetary union. This paper focuses on the openness of a monetary union, and examines how the degrees and characteristics of the sensitivities of its member nations towards external shocks...

This paper develops a simple growth model with moral hazard contracting to examine the interactions between the organizational mode of firms and economic productivity growth. The organizational mode of firms differs in terms of the degree to which decisions of R&D investment are delegated to a...

Many people now fear crime in Japan, which has had the image of being a safe country, because the crime rate has increased dramatically and the rate of crime detection has decreased at the same time. As demand for low-crime residential areas becomes stronger, low-crime rates may affect land...

This paper examines a multi-agent moral hazard model in which agents have expectation-based reference-dependent preferences `a la K˝oszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The agents’ utilities depend not only on their realized outcomes but also on the comparisons of their realized outcomes with their...

This paper theoretically examines whether an individual transferable quotas (ITQs) regime can achieve the long-run efficiency through the reduction of vessel numbers. Assuming the existence of two types of vessels in terms of their scales, we consider not only quota transactions but also the...