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This paper investigates the decision problem of an incumbent firm confronted by both a weak and strong entrant in a differentiated market. Suppose that the incumbent can deter entry of the weak firm, but cannot deter entry of the strong firm by itself. Then the incumbent may allow entry of the weak firm and use it to alter the strong firm's entry decision. The present paper formalizes this idea, and it sheds new light on the fact that domestic firms are sometimes able to block strong foreign firms after trade liberalization. The idea also explains why a dominant firm lets fringe firms be in the market.

This paper investigates strategic motives of macroeconomic forecasters and the effect of their professional affiliations. The 'wishful expectations hypothesis' suggests that a forecaster predicts what his employer wishes. The 'publicity hypothesis' argues that forecasters are evaluated by both accuracy and ability to generate publicity, and that forecasters in industries that emphasize publicity most will make most extreme and least accurate predictions. The 'signaling hypothesis' asserts that an extreme forecast signals confidence in own ability, because incompetent forecasters would mimic others to avoid public notice. Empirical evidence from a 26-year panel of annual GDP forecasts is con-sistent with the publicity hypothesis. This indicates that conventional tests of rationality are biased toward rejecting the rational expectations hypothesis. Copyright ? 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper analyzes the rationality of Japanese GDP forecasts of individual economists. It finds that Japanese forecasters are pessimistic (optimistic) when their forecast revisions are positive (negative), and that they always overreact to new information. Across forecasters, the magnitude of average forecast revisions is not correlated with the magnitude of average forecast errors. These results together are consistent with neither the rational expectations hypothesis nor reputation models with rational and strategic forecasters.

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