A Mathematical Representation of "Excitement" in Games from the Viewpoint of a Neutral Audience

Researchers have long believed the concept of "excitement" in games to be subjective and difficult to measure. This paper presents the development of a mathematically computable index that measures this concept from the viewpoint of an audience. One of the key aspects of the index is the differential of the probability of "winning" before and after one specific "play" in a given game. If the probability of winning becomes very positive or negative by that play, then the audience will feel the game to be "exciting." The index makes a large contribution to the study of games and enables researchers to compare and analyze the "excitement" of various games. It may be applied to many fields especially the area of welfare economics, ranging from allocative efficiency to axioms of justice and equity.

A Mathematical Representation of "Excitement" in Games: A Contribution to the Theory of Game Systems

Researchers have long believed the concept of "excitement" in games to be subjective and difficult to measure. This paper presents the development of a mathematically computable index that measures the concept from the viewpoint of an audience and from that of a player. One of the key aspects of the index is the differential of the probability of "winning" before and after one specific "play" in a given game. The index makes a large contribution to the study of games and enables researchers to compare and analyze the “excitement” of various games. It may be applied in many fields, especially the area of welfare economics, and applications may range from those related to allocative efficiency to axioms of justice and equity.

A New Measurement for International Fragmentation of the Production Process: An International Input-Output Approach

The paper investigates the possibility of constructing a new measurement for analysing international fragmentation of the production process. It asserts that the current usage of relevant data, whether the trade shares of parts and components or the index of Vertical Specialisation, is quite unsatisfactory for measuring the phenomenon, since they critically lack the overall perspective of the entire structure of production chains. 　The new measurement is formulated such that it captures every aspect of the vertical sequence of production linkages. It is based on the input-output model of Average Propagation Lengths, recently developed by Eric Dietzenbacher and others, which show the average number of production stages that are passed through for an exogenous change in one industry to affect another. By applying this model to the data of the Asian International Input-Output Tables, the index is able to measure the international dimension of production sharing and division of labour in East Asia.

An empirical analysis on the efficiency of the microfinance investment market

This paper empirically analyzes the market efficiency of microfinance investment funds. For the empirical analysis, we use an index of the microfinance investment funds and apply two kinds of variance ratio tests to examine whether or not this index follows a random walk. We use the entire sample period from December 2003 to June 2010 as well as two sub-samples which divide the entire period before and after January 2007. The empirical evidence demonstrates that the index does not follow a random walk, suggesting that the market of the microfinance investment funds is not efficient. This result is not affected by changes in either empirical techniques or sample periods.