‘Charging’ in gaming means spending real money to purchase in-game property. This paper investigates consumer behavior concerning charging in online gaming from the perspective of time preferences and present biases. I will show the following three results. (1) Time preference rate does not affect charging. (2) The degree of present bias has a positive effect on charging behavior. (3) Naive consumers tend to be charged more often in online gaming.

This article studies a class of omnichannel strategies to respond to consumer behaviors with time discount rate. The time discount rate for products at which consumers evaluate them in a future moment is critical for the purchase strategies when an online firm thinks to open a shop in brick-and-mortar form to encourage consumers to purchase with information about the products. We analyze optimal behaviors of consumers and the firm in both online and real channels and conclude that omnichannel strategy is not optimal when the time discount rate is sufficiently high.

This study applied Case-Based Decision Theory (CBDT) to the consumers’ decision to adopt a “really new” product, which can be depicted as an uncertain situation. Based on an experimental survey on the adoption of “Google Glass,” study 1 showed the findings that the CBDT model performed better than the multi-attribute decision (MAD) model in shaping the decision to adopt the product. Furthermore, current research on new product adoption recognizes the importance of “learning” acquired from external information, study 2 extended the CBDT by including the possibility of getting information about product positioning, as this represents the fastest phase in the process of “learning”. I developed a hypothesis that consumers utilize the product positioning information to identify the “case” to take into account within the CBDT. Also, assuming the product innovativeness could affect the hypothesis, I tested by giving two different types of the product category (HMD and smartphone, implying product innovativeness was high and low) to “Google Glass” by advertising. As a result of the experiment, the hypothesis was verified only when the new product was positioned as innovative.

By using web survey results, I find retirement benefit functions as a talent screening device in the following two ways. Firstly, retirement benefit would identify employees preferring to stay with its current employer long and having low time preference. However, this may not necessarily be true to non-regular employees. Secondly, it may identify job seekers with low time preference wishing to work with a single employer for a longer period. And the same can be applied to non-regular employees who are willing to change jobs.

In this paper, we analyze the influence of individual consciousness such as trust and civicness on their preferences for policy choices regarding tax and social security by using the results of the questionnaire. In particular, looking into the characteristics of people who prefer an expansion of social security without increasing taxes, they have lower trust and civicness but depend more on the government and are skeptical of the market economy, compared to those who take into consideration of the consistency of fiscal balance between benefits and burdens of social security. For the former, their years of education are comparatively less, and they earn a lower hourly income as well as lower relative income. These results suggest that trust of the government, employment opportunities, civicness, and education, which includes understanding of the market economy, are important in maintaining sustainability in fiscal balance and the social security system.

It is widely acknowledged that problem of income inequality and redistribution policy should be appropriately implemented to reduce the inequality. After 2010’s, due to income inequality within a country, United States came to change the policies towards the closed economy although the United states had played leading role to promote the free-trade. Reflecting the real situation after the 21th century, a number of economists have analyzed the inequality and income redistribution. Especially, in the field of behavioral economics in which researchers consider psychological factors, abundant important findings have been accumulated by using leading-edge methods. This article reviewed how the long-standing inequality problem has been analyzed。Then, I mentioned the remaining issues to be addressed for researchers of behavioral economics in the future.

This article reviews the theory and empirical evidence on first-day IPO returns. Although the IPO puzzle has a longstanding tradition of scholarly interest, it is still being debated. In recent years, advances in technology and the advent of novel data and methods have assisted our understanding of the IPO puzzle. In this work, I provide an overview of recent developments in IPO research from the behavioral perspective.

In this research, we conducted a face-to-face trading pit market experiment in Kenya to investigate how ethnic diversity in market participants affects the performance of market mechanism. The subjects in our experiment were from three major ethnic groups in Kenya-Luo, Kikuyu, and Kalenjin. In the trading sessions with Luo and/or Kikuyu subjects only, we did not observe convergence of trading prices or allocations. In the trading sessions including Kalenjin subjects who were generally described as conservative and cautious, however, trading prices and allocations converged to the equitable equilibrium. Our results suggest that ethnic differences may have a large impact on outcomes of market trading, but even the face-to-face bilateral trading between people of different ethnic groups does not necessarily cause large inequalities of income or welfare.

This paper reviews the studies on behavioral economics in health and medical fields. We divide the studies into the following two categories. First, some empirical or experimental studies examine how behavioral biases and characteristics in patients’ decision making promote or impede the behaviors that will lead to desirable health outcomes. In details, the studies report that risk-averse individuals are likely to take such behaviors, while those with a high rate of time-discounting or present bias are not. Second, other experimental studies use the behavioral biases and characteristics, and develop and provide nudges to promote patients’ behaviors that will lead to desirable health outcomes. Furthermore, recent researchers conduct behavioral economics studies, by using doctors’ and nurses’ samples. Finally, we suggest that researchers explore nudges with long-term and stable effects.

The number of cross-sectional predictors has soared in the last two decades and that made this area of research as “factor zoo”. Recent trend in asset pricing research focus on how we sort out these factors. From practitioner’s viewpoint, factor choice is the most important task for the successful asset management. We discuss the possibility of AI (machine learning and non-linear estimation) in optimizing portfolio given the past factor performance. We also discuss the return predictability of the model which uses data with limited availability.

It is increasingly important to accumulate the evidence about how monetary incentives and nudges change various human behaviors. In this paper, we outline the results of previous research on health promotion based on field experiments and introduce the results of our own research conducted at Keihanna Gakken city in Kyoto Prefecture.