In European tradition, knives are beveled on both sides of the blade; coming to a point in the middle. In Japanese tradition, however, the bevel is only formed on one side (usually the right-hand side). What is the purpose and/or advantage of this?
Knife Skills – Advantages of Using a Knife Beveled on One Side
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Well your chef's knife should constitute about 90% of your usage I'd say. It should be used for slicing, dicing just about anything. Your paring knife is actually the 3-4" one you describe. Paring knives are typically used for delicate tasks like, coring apples, peeling, and some people use it for mincing garlic because it's so small.
I've never seen a 2" serrated knife before, so I'm not sure what I'd use that for if anything. If you're using it because it seems to do a better job on the vegetables, then that's a sign that your chef's knife is dull. I have seen tomatoes sliced with a 6" serrated utility knife due to their tenderness. However, you generally don't want to use a serrated knife on an onion, this will cause a lot of the gas to be released that makes you cry.
I found an informative .pdf, image below. Also, youtube has videos.
Click on the image for a slightly easier to read version, but the PDF version is much clearer.
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Best Answer
For vegetable knives, the main advantage of the front-side single bevel is that it's easier to make super-thin cuts. For example, a test of knife skill involves paring daikon radish to remove the peel, then continuing to cut to make a long continuous paper-thin strip, longer than you would be able to make if you just sliced it. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLZUJGyuhQM
People who have mastered this skill can also make remarkably fast matchstick cuts after making the long piece, and the lack of back bevel may reduce the amount of food that sticks to the knife. Some of these single-bevel knives that features a slightly concave backside (urasuki), which may also reduce the amount of adherence of food to the knife.
For crab knives, the honing is on the opposite side to the hand (the back of the knife), which may reduce the amount of shell fragments that could embed themselves into the meat, and probably allows the meat to cut more cleanly.
In practice, though, most Japanese households use dual-beveled knives. Single-bevel is more common in professional kitchens, especially in the Kansai area where fancy cutting techniques are used in presentation to a greater extent than in Tokyo or north Japan.
Although I have a nice nakiri knife and a cheap santoku, both are dual-beveled.
Knives meant for cutting regular fish or meat are usually, but not always, dual-beveled, the exception again mostly being for professionals. (I think yanagiba and sushi knives are usually single-bevel, but are again mostly used in professional kitchens and almost never at home). I thought sobakiri and udonkiri were typically single-bevel to help push the cut noodles away, but more recently I am less sure that the single-bevel is as common as I had previously thought for soba or udon knives.
The Japanese wikipedia entry for usuba knives suggests that the single-bevel edge is more durable, so, if true, that would be an advantage in high volume restaurant use. In my experience a thin, well sharpened Japanese blade may chip more easily than a thicker blade, so that resonates with me, even though I'm not 100% sure the notion that a single bevel is more durable is more than received wisdom.
With practice, I think you can get slightly higher precision cuts with a single bevel than with dual-bevel knives, however, I don't think they are as easy to use for cooks with average knife skills.