The Todai-Yale Initiative Lecture Series Spring 2009(2/23/09‐3/31/09)
March 31, 2009
The Decline of Particularism in Japanese Politics
Gregory W. Noble - Professor, Institute of Social Science
< Summary >
Despite the storied role of particularistic spending in postwar Japanese politics, expenditures
on roads, bridges, agricultural projects and the like have steadily lost ground to more programmatic outlays on social welfare, education, science and technology, and public safety (but not defense or foreign aid). Former Prime Minister Koizumi played an important role in this shift, but the trends preceded him and have continued under his much weaker successors. The shift away from particularism reflects the interaction of three loose policy coalitions: neo-liberals, social democrats, and fiscal conservatives. The three groups differ on ultimate goals, but agree on the need to cut particularistic spending first. The predominance of these policy coalitions, in turn, reflects the changing environment surrounding Japanese economic policy: weak economic growth that has hardened the constraints on Japanese budgets; increasing dependence on international financial markets; demands for social welfare from a rapidly aging society; electoral and administrative reforms; and, largely as a result, mass and elite opinion increasingly intolerant of wasteful spending. Programmatic politics now dominates Japanese politics, and may motivate partisan reshuffling.
March 13, 2009
Customer Lifetime Value and RFM Data: ACCOUNTING YOUR CUSTOMERS: ONE BY ONE
Makoto Abe - Professor , Graduate School of Economics
< Summary >
A customer behavior model that permits the estimation of customer lifetime value (CLV) from standard RFM data in “non-contractual” setting is developed by extending the hierarchical Bayes (HB) framework of the Pareto/NBD model (Abe 2008). The model relates customer characteristics to frequency, dropout and spending behavior, which, in turn, is linked to CLV to provide useful insight into acquisition. The proposed model (1) relaxes the assumption of independently distributed parameters for frequency, dropout and spending processes across customers, (2) accommodates the inclusion of covariates through hierarchical modeling, (3) allows easy estimation of latent variables at the individual level, which could be useful for CRM, and (4) provides the correct measure of errors. The proposed model was evaluated against the benchmark Pareto/NBD-based model on actual RFM data. Several substantive issues are uncovered. First, both of our datasets exhibit correlation between frequency and spending parameters, violating the assumption of the existing Pareto/NBD-based CLV models. Second, useful insight into acquisition is gained by decomposing the effect of change in covariates on CLV into three components: frequency, dropout and spending. Third, not accounting for uncertainty in parameter estimate can cause large bias in measures, such as CLV and elasticity.
February 23, 2009
Asian way of life seen through AsiaBarometer
Daesong Hyun - Associate Professor , Institute of Oriental Culture
< Summary >
In this lecture, based on the AsiaBarometer 2006 which surveyed seven Confucian countries( China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam), several aspects of Asian way of life will be examined. Focusing on the legacy of Confucian virtues in the industrialized and modernized Asian countries, the findings and implications of the comparative analysis about the perceptions of identify, national pride, satisfaction of life, their attitudes in terms of their delight, anger, sorrow and pleasure etcetera will be introduced.
