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application/pdf, This paper investigates a market situation in which firms freely can choose whether they implement an affirmative action policy or not. We show that affirmative action policies can be abused by firms. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations where a firm's implementation of affirmative action policies can employ more desirable workers, but is detrimental to the minority workers in the firm.

application/pdf, The present paper fully characterizes equilibria of the generalized volunteer’s dilemma game, which is an integration of the volunteer’s dilemma game and the step-level public goods game with binary decision. We also examined the explanatory power of a widely accepted model with bounded rationality, the quantal response equilibrium (QRE), It is shown that the performance of the QRE model is better in explaining laboratory data.

In Japan, TV platforms regulate themselves as to the length of the advertisements they air. Using modified Hotelling models, we investigate whether such self-regulation improves consumer and social welfare or not. When all consumers choose a single TV program (the utility functions of consumers satisfy the standard ‘full-coverage’condition), self-regulation always reduces consumer welfare. It improves social welfare only if the advertisement revenue of each platform is not small and the cost parameter of investments in improving the quality of TV programs is small. When some consumers have outside options (the standard ‘full-coverage’ condition is not satisfied), self-regulation can benefit consumers because it increases the number of consumers who watch TV programs.

In today's science-driven industries, such as the semiconductor industry, firms are increasingly engaged in across-firm research and development projects in the form of a research consortium or a strategic alliance. Those collaboration processes, however, have complex aspects due to the competing relationship of the firms in product markets and will not be successful unless the participating firms have enough incentives to reveal their private information and to exert sufficient efforts. The paper attempts to explore the conditions under which firms have enough incentives to reveal their information and/or to expend collaborative efforts. Three existing economic models are examined for this purpose. It is argued that those incentives depend upon the nature of competition in the product markets, information structure, and the way that each firm's private information affects this competition. The models examined in the paper suggest that some mechanism is necessary to evaluate private technical information of each firm and to convey it to the other firms without distortion. This conclusion coincides with the observed fact that a neutral third-party plays an indispensable role in a successful research consortium.