earticle

영어

A simple economic model of two literature producers’ competition for a given number of readers is provided. Each of the producers tries to maximize her or his relative influence on readers’ utility by choosing a proportion of Hangeul-only and Hanja-mixed literatures in her or his given production capacity. It is shown that the fundamental factors for the market equilibrium proportion of Hangeul-only and Hanja-mixed literatures are readers’ degree of literacy for each letter-use pattern of literature, Hanja-learning cost and its distribution over readers. An interesting implication of the market equilibrium proportion is that Korea is likely to have a higher proportion of her own letter (i.e., Hangeul) only literature than Japan. The fundamental reason is that Hangeul is a phonemic, while Gana is a syllabary. In addition, we can infer that as government facilitates readers to learn Hanja or enforces them to learn Hanja with a regulation, market mechanism is led to have a higher proportion of Hanja-mixed literature. The contribution of this paper is that it analyzes the letter use pattern in a society from a positive or quantitative market point of view, while the discussions so far focused on the issue from a normative and government standpoint. Our simple model can be productively extended into several directions. Firstly, the producers should be able to produce literatures in any degree of mixture of Hangeul(or Gana) and Hanja. Secondly, the interaction of producers and readers regarding Hanja-learning needs to be fully analyzed. We could assume that readers respond to market equilibrium with one period of time lag and we can build a recursive model based on that assumption. Lastly, access to the cultural capital formed in the long past and the literatures produced in the neighborhood countries belonging to the same Hanja cultural world are the additional benefits to the Hanja-learned. If readers and producers take these benefits into account, the market equilibrium would tend to a higher proportion of Hanja-mixed literature.