This paper explores studies concerning the effect of marriage on happiness and reports the followings: Those who marry are happier than those who don’t. There exists bilateral causality between marriage and happiness. Happiness rises with marriage, but thereafter begins to decline shortly. Whether the adaptation is perfect or not is still undetermined. Why people get married? What kind of couples get married and become happy? Becker (1973) proposed a model of household production, and demonstrated that while the division of labor in a household is efficient, husband and wife who have similar traits are often efficient. The latter is known as the assortative mating hypothesis in psychology and sociology and many studies have reported that couples who have similar values and/or personality get married and become happy.

In order to control subjects’ preferences, monetary rewards are paid in economic experiments. But the payment methods so far proposed have some difficulties. For avoiding those problems, conducting an experiment with one and only one trial is necessary.

People do not always take desirable actions for society. However, changing the choice and behavior of individuals from a social point of view should be applied to the social issues with paying careful attention to the importance of individual subjective decision making. In this chapter, we will discuss about behavior changes in healthcare and health behavior as typical examples of behavior change, then introduce the basic theory of behavior change, and the neuroscientific basis of social behavior change. Finally, we discuss the strategic design that enables behavior change by using the case of expressing the intention of organ donation.

We firstly explain the relationship between psychology and behavioral economics from historical perspective. We also theroretically and emprically demonstrated that classical psychophysics which was considered to be an origin of psychology is closely related to probability weigting function in prospect theory which is typical behavioral economic theory.

We review previous studies regarding the dual process theory and the context effect which are closely related to both behavioral economics and marketing. We also provide a real data analysis which illustrates the attraction effect from purchase history data in supermarkets.

This article aims at contributing to the behavioral economic studies by providing a comprehensive literature survey on relationship between self-control and decision making. Self-control is defined based on the dual-process theory, thereby discussing its theoretical and empirical implications for decision making and behavior. Comprehensive survey is provided for empirical insights that have been found not only in economics but also in psychology and other related fields on behavioral effects of self-control and its depletion. Theoretical implications of self-control are discussed using dual-self models based on the temptation theory. A direction toward new consumption theory incorporating limited willpower is suggested, wherein endogenizing willpower dynamics allows us to describe the convexity of self-control costs and the intertemporal substitutability of self-control as consistent with stylized facts.

The issues of low fertility and aging population make progress in Japan and many countries in the world mean that a large fraction of the population in each country’s cognitive ability declines either as a normal aging process or as dementia. In addition, the child care service becomes more important as female labor participation increases. Given that an old person whose cognitive ability has severely declined, or a child cannot effectively use the market mechanism alone, an important problem is how the market and community mechanisms should be combined for the society. Behavioral economics has not yet completed a framework for such a problem. Various research, however, has already been conducted that will be useful to do research on such a problem and related problems. An example is a study of how to introduce an ethical vies that is called virtue ethics to models with endogenous preferences. This paper surveys research on normative economics and the community from this point of view.

In this paper, we introduce grit and mindset research, two streams of research in psychology, and discuss their implications for labor productivity improvement and their application to behavioral economics. In grit research, grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” while mindset research explores our two contrasting mindsets: the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. Both grit and mindset research indicate that abilities acquired by our efforts are much more important than we expected, and mindset is strongly associated with the process of acquiring new abilities. These fields of research suggest the low level of labor productivity in Japan might come from a cognitive bias toward a fixed mindset, which emphasizes innate talent rather than acquired abilities.

This study examines the empirical validity and cross-country comparison of the household consumption anomalies in four major economies of Japan, USA, China and India. The panel data from the “Household Survey on Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction” conducted by Osaka University in the four major economies over the years from 2009 to 2012 are statistically analyzed.

We found that the percentage of the hyperbolic households, which were defined by a testing to the householders on psychological rate of discount over times, to the general households are different in Japan (21%) the highest and USA (14%) the lowest with China (16%) and India (17%) in middle range. Hyperbolic household anomalies with higher consumption were confirmed in Japan and India, partially in USA, but not in China. The stronger tracking of consumption to income were confirmed in India in a linear mode and in USA in a non-linear mode but not in Japan, which tracks income less but debts more in a time more or less suffering from the impacts of global financial crisis. The stronger marginal propensity to consume of fixed assets of the hyperbolic householders in USA and India are confirmed in contradiction to the previous researches in Japan and USA. It implies possible systematic increase of propensity and self-control variability under circumstance of financial innovation, which enhances the liquidity of assets and limits the commitment effect of hyperbolic householders.

In this paper, using discrete selection experiments, it was analyzed whether posting a farmer’s portrait at the vegetable department could increase the consumer’s willingness to buy. Analysis results, People who tend to buy vegetables with a farmer’s portrait are: ① male, ② going buy vegetables 1.2 times a month or once a week, ③ believe that the farmer’s portrait posted on the vegetable department is the farmer himself, ④ without knowledge of traceability system. And, people who tend to buy at a direct sale are: ① most of the generation male, ② women in their 40’s, ③ going buy vegetables once or three times a week, ④ believe that the farmer’s portrait posted on the vegetable department is the farmer himself, ⑤ have knowledge about the traceability system but have never used it. From these results, it is possible to increase the consumer’s purchase intention by posting the farmer’s face photo under these conditions: ① marketing for men, ② selling in the direct sale place, ③ Complementary until the traceability system is enriched and alternatives from the enrichment.

The present study derives the Nash equilibrium and absorbing sets of the contribution game, which is an extension of the inequality aversion model, to build a model including parameters of unhappiness and guilty in the profit function of this game. Prior resarch of the contribution game on the social network assumes a circle network connected to two adjacent players. Each player’s strategy on this game is “Contribution” and “Defect” to the public goods. Each player’s profit function depends on the other player’s strategies. The present study shows that Nash equilibrium and absorbing sets, as many players choose “Contribution”, are realized under the interval by using parameters of unhappiness and guilty. This implies that, under some assumptions, many people collaborate in this game on the social network if their guilty is larger than their unhappiness.

This paper empirically analyzed the relationship between overconfidence and rate plan selection for cell phones based on the results of a questionnaire survey. In the hypothetical question, we asked the survey participants to select a plan which they considered to be the cheapest among the four cell phone rate plans. Empirical analysis shows that people with overconfidence tend to choose the cell phone plan by themselves.