Games for the Strategic Influence of Expectations

We introduce a new class of games where each player's aim is to randomise her strategic choices in order to affect the other players' expectations aside from her own. The way each player intends to exert this influence is expressed through a Boolean combination of polynomial equalities and inequalities with rational coefficients. We offer a logical representation of these games as well as a computational study of the existence of equilibria.Comment: In Proceedings SR 2014, arXiv:1404.041

Elections, Wars, and Protests? A Longitudinal Look at Foreign News on Canadian Television

This study reports on the Canadian data from a recent international content analysis of broadcast news in 18 countries. With a mind to Robert A. Hackett’s longitudinal analysis of foreign news on CBC and CTV in 1989, the current study addresses questions of foreign news prominence, geographic distribution, topic coverage, and variation between networks, noting differences and similarities in the content of foreign news in light of shifting cultural, political, and economic environments; news production processes; and communication technologies. This analysis provides an update to Hackett’s seminal work, painting a picture of the Canadian foreign news landscape two decades later

Financial Liberalization and Japan's Agricultural Cooperatives

The system of agricultural cooperatives, called JA, is one of the most politically powerful organizations in Japan, and it has continuously called for agricultural protection. In spite of its importance, information on JA's banking and insurance businesses has been limited for foreign researchers because of the uniqueness and complexity of the JA system. This paper provides a clear understanding of JA's activities and explains the political dynamics in Japan's agricultural sector. Up until the early 1990s, JA could count on stable profits from its banking and insurance businesses because of the government's favorable treatment of JA. Using these profits, JA had been successfully forming farmers into a solid voting group until the mid-1990s. However, the government gradually abandoned its favorable treatment of JA in order to introduce more competition in financial markets. As a result, profitability of J's banking and insurance businesses became unstable in the mid-1990s. The mid-1990s can be regarded as the turning point of the political dynamics of Japan's agricultural sector. As JA lost stable profits, its organizing ability and political power also weakened. The political pressure for agricultural protection also decreased. Because of this decrease in political pressure, there is now a prime opportunity for the Japanese government to reform its agricultural policies. It is not agricultural market and/or trade liberalization that is providing this opportunity. Instead, financial liberalization is providing this opportunity.Agribusiness, Financial Economics, E5, Q13, Q18,

Economics and Politics of Rice Policy in Japan: A Perspective on the Uruguay Round

This paper reviews the recent problems of the opening of Japan's rice market and evaluates the Japanese government's rice policy from both an economic and political viewpoint. The Japanese government made strenuous resistance to the opening of Japan's rice market during the negotiations on agricultural trade at the GATT Uruguay Round. Eventually Japan's rice was made exempt from tariffication by compensating in the form of increased 'minimum access' import quotas. However, the tariffication rule of the final agreement guarantees that importing countries can impose considerably high tariffs. Thus, the volume of Japan's rice imports could be decreased if the Japanese government accepted the tariffication agreement. In retrospect the decisions made by the Japanese government have effectively protected the vested interests of the domestic rice distribution system, while hindering the structural improvement of the Japanese rice industry.