A game theoretic approach to the political economy of the Korean rice market

The main focus of the thesis is to develop a model to discuss normative issues such as fairness of policy. As a by-product, a better measurement of political power has been devised, which enables us to handle positive economic issues such as efficiency more concretely.;To do so, the ;A better measure of political power is another contribution of this model. If we use bargaining models to estimate political power as others have, we are assuming that players are playing according to the rule of the game. However, we often observe actual outcomes different from bargaining game outcomes. Thus, conventional bargaining models fail to provide a good measure of actual political power. If we use the PPF approach, even though we try to get an actual measure of political power from an actual distribution of welfare, we ignore bargaining aspects of the game and therefore fail to capture an accurate measure of political power. My game model uses an actual observation as a base to estimate political power and releases the linearity assumption of the objective function in both lines of study.;I applied this model to the Korean rice market. A major finding is that the Korean government has gotten more and more utilitarian in policy and should have imported rice to sustain neutrality to inequity in Korean rice market.