PUNCTUALITY: JAPANESE BUSINESS CULTURE, RAILWAY SERVICE AND COORDINATION PROBLEM

Öz

Many people have impression that Japanese are punctual. In fact, we can easily find data and cases supporting this impression. In contrast, many Western people who visited Japan in the second half of 20th century observed that Japanese seemed to be not punctual. So, it can be safely said that we have punctuality- culture and unpunctuality-culture in Japan. To the best of my knowledge, there is no study explaining logically why such contradictory cultures emerge in one society. One of this paper’s purposes is to explain this. In order to do so, I adopt game theoretic approach. Specifically, I consider a game where each agent chooses to be punctual or not. Punctuality has an effect like public goods. I prove that there are two Nash Equilibria in this game. In one equilibrium, each agent chooses not to be punctual. On the other hands, each agent chooses to be punctual in the other equilibrium. This explanation sheds a new light on Japanese business activity. In Japan, railway service is very punctual. But in the beginning of the state-owned railway, the service was unpunctual. There are also contradictory cultures. I explain these cultures using Game theory and suggest some hypotheses about factors creating change from the unpunctuality-culture to the punctuality- culture

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Punctuality, Culture, Coordination problem

Kaynakça

1. Aoki, Masahiko (2000), Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis, Cambridge: MIT Press.
2. Hirshleifer, Jack (1983), “From weakest-link to best-shot: The voluntary provision of public goods,” Public Choice Vol. 41, No. 3, pp.371-386.
3. Kandori, Michihiro, Geroge Mailath and Rafael Rob (1993), “Learning, mutation, and long run equilibria in games,” Econometrica Vol. 61, No.1, pp29-56.
4. Levine, Robert (1997), A Geography of Time: On Tempo, Culture, and the Pace of Life, New York: Basic Books.
5. Matsuyama, Kiminori (1996), “Economic development as coordination problem,” (in Masahiko Aoki, Hyung-Ki Kim and Masahiro Okuno-Fujiwara-Ed., The role of Government in East Asian Economic Development), Oxford: Oxford University Press pp.134-160
6. Nakamura, Naofumi (2002),“Railway system and time consciousness in modern Japan,” Japan Review Vol. 14, pp.13-38.
7. Nishimoto, Ikuko (1999), “‘Harmony’ as ‘Efficiency’: Is ‘Just-In-Time’ a product of Japanese uniqueness?,” Time & Society, Vol. 8, pp.119-149.
8. Ohshima, Fujitaro (1956), Japan National Railway (in Japanese), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

9. Takekuma, Tamio (2002), “The time revolution of the railway in the 1920s: The impact of the changeover to automatic couplers,” Japan Review Vol. 14, pp.39-62. Tsunoyama, Sakae (1998), Revolution in Time (in Japanese), Tokyo: Shinshokan.