中川 訓範

We consider the relationship between passenger behaviour and airline behaviour through flight scheduling and price competition. We focus on how an option for early ticket purchase affects the competition between two airlines. In our model, airlines set two ticket prices for passengers: one before the passengers know when they would take the flight; and the other after they know the most preferable time to take the flight. We find that in a subgame perfect equilibrium, airlines operate flights on an efficient schedule from the perspective of passengers.

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the changes. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at creating municipalities of a certain size. Japan’s local governance policy allocates tax revenues to municipalities based on the financial shortages of each municipality, which is designed to ensure financial equality among municipalities so that the central government can evenly maintain public services, especially in rural areas. Thus, if the central government eases population discrepancy among municipalities and creates a large number of uniformly sized municipalities, then the central government can reduce subsidies to local governments. The government’s previous policies on municipal mergers were enacted to foster this sort of efficiency. We examine changes in the distribution of municipal jurisdiction sizes to determine the actual effect of municipal merger policies. We obtain the result that the great municipal mergers of the 1950s Showa era made the municipalities more equal in size, which shows that the Municipality Merger Promotion Law of 1953 had an impact on the change of the size distribution of municipalities.

本稿では,ホテリングに始まる空間競争(spatial competition)モデルの概略を述べ,空間競争モデルの数理的な構造が持つ経済学的な含意について述べることを意図する.1節では空間競争のモデルに関する研究の概略を紹介する.2節では,特に消費者の選好や分布の観点から,このモデルの数理的構造が持つ経済学的な意義について述べる.