Japanese Economic Review最新文献

Fukubukuro (or lucky bag) is a familiar institution in Japan and elsewhere in which the exact contents of a New Year sales item are hidden from the consumer before purchase. Motivated by the fukubukuro example and the lack of evidence on risk attitudes in lotteries involving goods, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which the outcomes are bundled or unbundled goods. The implied gains to a monopoly seller for marketing goods in lottery form rather than separately are only clearly positive for lotteries where there is a higher probability of obtaining the more highly valued good.

“Frequent-buyer” rewards programmes are commonly used by companies as a marketing tool to compete for market share. They provide a unique environment for studying consumers’ forward-looking behaviour. The consumer's problem on accumulating reward points can be formulated as a stationary infinite horizon discrete choice dynamic programming model. We show that the parameters of this model, including the discount factor, are well-identified. In particular, it is possible to identify state-dependent discount factors (i.e. discount factors can vary with the number of reward points). We discuss how this identification result is related to the goal-gradient hypothesis studied in the consumer psychology literature.

Facing generic competition, brand-name drug companies sometimes launch their own generics called “authorised generics” (AGs) through a third-party entity. If that strategy works, an AG should be launched for every branded drug that comes off patent. This, however, contradicts the fact that only a small proportion of branded drugs have had AGs. To explain this puzzle, I develop a two-period model in which a brand-name drug company exploits its name brand before generic entry. The model predicts that the brand-name company launches an AG only when brand loyalty is sufficiently weak.

We examine strategic product line choices of manufacturers in a stylised duopoly model where products have asymmetric and interdependent market conditions. We characterise the optimal product line decisions and show that manufacturers always prefer to have head-to-head competition (and never segment markets) when product line setup cost is small relative to profitability of the products. When setup costs are high, symmetric manufacturers may prefer to have asymmetric product lines or market segmentation. We show that high setup costs lead to the market segmentation outcome only if there is no significant market size difference and the level of product substitutability is moderate.

Cai and Shintani (2006, Econometric Theory, 22, 347–372) considered the impact of introducing an inconsistent long-run variance estimator when constructing a class of kernel-based ratio tests for testing non-stationarity in the series. They found that the quotient of two estimators with different rates of convergence under the null and the alternative hypotheses may lead to a test having an interesting size and power trade-off. This paper develops modified versions of this test, presents new asymptotic results and tabulates critical values. The finite sample performance is explored through Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that the modifications proposed lead to more powerful unit root tests.

In this paper, we survey the empirical analysis of brands. The difficulty in this area of research is that even though a brand is easily identifiable, its economic roles are not directly observable. We first discuss methods where the effect of a brand is measured as the unobservable component of sales or price of a product, which researchers recover as a residual of the sales or price regression. We then describe the approaches to estimate the various roles of brands, such as providing information and increasing the utility of consumption. Finally, we provide examples of research that highlight the role of brands in exploiting the irrationality of consumers for profit.

Female happiness has been paradoxically declining over recent decades in reverse proportion to expanding opportunities for women in developed countries, but this subject has not been explored in Japan. Using JGSS, we found that Japanese women have been slightly happier in both absolute and relative terms to men in the 2000s. While happiness of men aged 35–49 and 65 and over temporarily declined in the first half of the decade, women in age groups 20–34 and 65 and over gained happiness in the second half. Moreover, trends in life satisfaction in terms of economic aspects are similar for men and women, slightly advantageous to men in marriage, and largely advantageous to women in non-market and non-family aspects.

Using panel data obtained from monthly surveys for 3 years, we examined how the effects of life events on smoking and drinking behaviours differ between men and women. The key findings were that: (i) consumption of alcohol and cigarettes by men and women were lower during pregnancy and after childbirth than before pregnancy; (ii) pregnancy and childbirth led women to stop drinking and led men to reduce their alcohol consumption but not to stop drinking; and (iii) marriage, pregnancy and childbirth led women to stop smoking and marriage and birth led men to stop smoking but the effects of pregnancy on men are unclear.

We examine the effects of switching costs in a two-period Hotelling-type model where a profit-maximising private firm competes with a welfare-maximising public firm. We show that, in contrast with the case in which both firms are private, where switching costs raise prices in both periods, in the mixed duopoly they raise prices in the second period but reduce them in the first period. Moreover, the first-period price reduction is of such magnitude that switching costs reduce firms’ profits and raise consumer welfare. We also find that switching costs affect the consequences of privatisation in favour of firms and against consumers.