Kiyohiko G. Nishimura - Böcker

Several years have passed since the 'store wars' over barriers to foreign products at Japanese distribution firms. Yet among English-speaking readers, how these firms operate remains a puzzle. In this book, the best Japanese scholars in their fields attempt to unravel that puzzle. Avoiding culture-based explanations, they employ a systematic and rigorous economic logic---yet, since they also avoid mathematical notation, the argument remains accessible to generalist readers.Collectively, the authors make four basic points:* Within a country, distribution is less similar than it appears. Not only does it vary enormously across industries, but it often varies within a given industry as well.* Across countries, distribution is less diverse than it appears. Although appearances sometimes suggest major cross-national contrasts, on more careful analysis the differences often disappear. * Distribution sometimes depends on the product involved. Because distribution functions as the principal means by which manufacturers acquire information about consumer preferences, the character of distribution can depend crucially both on demand patterns and on manufacturing technology. * In the absence of regulatory intervention, distribution generally will be efficient and non-exclusionary. Regulation usually introduces inefficiency and often creates barriers to entry. Importantly, however, the targets of exclusion will less often involve foreign than domestic competitors.To illustrate these points, the authors draw on both analyses that cross various sectors and analyses that are specific to sectors; they study both regulated and unregulated industries; they describe industries with extensive imports, industries with extensive exports, and industries with neither; they examine the effect of technological change; and they introduce a variety of case studies, from agriculture and automobiles to electrical appliances and apparel.

This is the first book to investigate individual’s pessimistic and optimistic prospects for the future and their economic consequences based on sound mathematical foundations. The book focuses on fundamental uncertainty called Knightian uncertainty, where the probability distribution governing uncertainty is unknown, and it provides the reader with methods to formulate how pessimism and optimism act in an economy in a strict and unified way. After presenting decision-theoretic foundations for prudent behaviors under Knightian uncertainty, the book applies these ideas to economic models that include portfolio inertia, indeterminacy of equilibria in the Arrow-Debreu economy and in a stochastic overlapping-generations economy, learning, dynamic asset-pricing models, search, real options, and liquidity preferences. The book then proceeds to characterizations of pessimistic (ε-contaminated) and optimistic (ε-exuberant) behaviors under Knightian uncertainty and  people’s inherent pessimism (surprise aversion) and optimism (surprise loving).  Those characterizations are shown to be useful in understanding several observed behaviors in the global financial crisis and in its aftermath.  The book is highly recommended not only to researchers who wish to understand the mechanism of how pessimism and optimism affect economic phenomena, but also to policy makers contemplating effective economic policies whose success delicately hinges upon people’s mindsets in the market.Kiyohiko Nishimura is Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Project Research Fellow of the Center for Advanced Research in Finance at The University of Tokyo. Hiroyuki Ozaki is Professor of Economics at Keio University.

This book answers the question of how exactly property price indexes should be constructed. The formation and collapse of property bubbles has had a profound impact on the economic administration of many nations.