Game Theoretic Analysis of Production Structures in the Japanese Animation Industry: Comparison of Conventional and Production Committee Systems

This paper presents a game theoretic analysis of production structures including several stakeholders in the Japanese animation market and its related goods markets. We construct a decision-making model of the industry including players of four kinds: an animation studio, a broadcasting company, a related products manufacturer, and consumers. Additionally, we model two production structures: the conventional system and the production committee system. By analyzing the equilibrium states of this model, we conclude theoretically that the animation studio raises the effort level with decreasing marginal costs of related products and/or with increasing network externality effect and increasing royalties the studio receives. For the total profit and the effort level, we found that the production committee system is better than the conventional system.