Construal level theory (CLT), which has been receiving increasing attention in Consumer Behavior Studies, posits that people's evaluation toward items and incidents differs by the psychological distance between oneself and the object. When this distance is close, people mentally construe the object in terms of low-level, detailed, and contextualized features. In contrast, when the distance is far, they construe the same object in terms of high-level, abstract, and stable characteristics. Such difference in mental construal leads to different evaluation, preference, and behavior.
In Behavioral Economics, preference reversal along a time axis is called time inconsistency and has been studied mainly using “discounting”. This research proposes that, by introducing the notion of discounting into the construal level theory, a wider class of preference reversal along psychological distance beyond a time axis can be explained. Survey studies on peoples' lottery choice are used to illustrate the points.

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A frequent rewards program is a sales promotion strategy used by retailers worldwide. If consumers are rational, price discounts should be preferred over earning equivalent amounts of points, because actual money is highly liquid. However, previous studies show that awarding points is more effective in bringing in high sales than offering price discounts. A question then arises, which carries higher perceived benefit between price discounts and offering points? This study investigated the effects of promotion type: price discounts and offering points, in two experimental studies. We found that offering points equivalent to price discounts are perceived to give a higher benefit than price discounts for low benefit level, but on the contrary, offering points and price discounts were not perceived as giving significantly different benefits for high benefit level. These findings provide further empirical support for the assertion on utility perception made by the mental accounting theory.

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When we think about the disaster prevention, it is important for us that we examine an accurate cost-benefit of measure, characteristic of inhabitants living in the dangerous area and what kind of reaction for a disaster risk. In this study, we investigated the reaction to disaster risk of inhabitants by doing questionnaire survey for 3,000 households in Tokyo. As a result, in dangerous area, there is a lot of household of low income groups, and cognitive rate of the objective risk tend to be high. In addition, we examined incentives to enforce disaster prevention measures using Probit's analysis in this study. As a result, it was suggested that an effect of time discount rate changed by residence local degree of risk, and neighboring local environment strongly influenced because seismic retrofit rate of each location significantly influenced.

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Despite the introduction of sophisticated stock market indices, investors often trade portfolios of the flawed indices to change their exposure to the market. In this study, we show that these transactions cause significant distortions in individual stock prices, especially during periods of significant market movement. As an influential, albeit flawed, stock index, we focus on the Nikkei 225. We find index constituents that are excessively weighted on the index, experience excessive buying (selling) pressure when the stock market surges (falls), and experience price corrections after such periods of change. In contrast, non-constituent stocks do not experience such trading pressure.

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I consider a situation in which workers have present-biased preferences and have a tendency to procrastinate their tasks, but underestimate the degree of self-control problems that they will face in the future. In such situations, their manager may want to introduce some form of competition to induce them to finish their tasks earlier. However, I show that the introduction of competition may delay the completion of their tasks. The intuition of the result is simple: The introduction of competition reinforces their belief that they will complete the task soon, which undermines their incentive to undertake the task now. This result holds even when there is only one worker who underestimates the degree of self-control problem, which suggests that the mere existence of a single “irrational” agent can undermine the overall performance of organizations.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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We test the canonical version of prospect theory using unique data from residents displaced by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster. To collect the data set, we designed and administered surveys to residents from Futaba (a town in Fukushima), who evacuated from the area because of high levels of radiation. As a result, all residents of Futaba lost their homes, land, and stable income sources. Using this incidence as a source of exogenous variations, our analysis reveals three significant empirical patterns. First, the displaced residents show unusually high levels of depression as captured by the Kessler 6 measure (K6), a widely-used measure of non-specific psychological distress. Second, we find that large losses of income, health, and home space are strongly associated with increased depression levels. Moreover, our empirical results show that psychological outcomes are more sensitive to losses than to gains, a finding which is largely consistent with the basic predictions of prospect theory.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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We examine how wage claims influence the principal–agent relationship between firms and workers with hidden action by using laboratory experiments on a gift exchange game in which workers make payoff-irrelevant requests concerning their wage before the firm makes a wage offer. We compare the experimental results of this game with those of a gift exchange game without wage claims and find that wage claims reduce reciprocity regardless of the wage levels offered by the firm, resulting in shrinking the economic surplus in their labor contracts.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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This study uses satisfaction data and examines how the financial burden of having children differs across countries. To do this, we focus our attention on the peculiar movement of satisfaction in the financial domain of life, which is measured by standardizing financial satisfaction by overall life satisfaction. Performing regression analyses with World and European Integrated Values Survey, we obtain the results that the negative impact of having an additional child on satisfaction becomes particularly greater in the financial domain as total fertility rate (TFR) decreases. The results also indicate that having children offers a sense of financial security to the elderly in high TFR countries while this is not the case in lower TFR countries. These results are consistent the idea that the heavier financial burden of having children is a major cause of fertility decline.

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This study aims to provide the theoretical basis of the age profile of subjective well-being. To do this, this study employs a bio-evolutionary framework on the premise that dissatisfaction works as a behavioral trigger, and considers how dissatisfaction evolves over the life cycle. The hypotheses developed in the theoretical consideration are as follows. First and second, the level of dissatisfaction due to the lack of income or the lack of an appropriate partner peaks in the reproductive period in which the lack of either had a serious impact on lifetime reproductive success in our evolutionary past. Third, the baseline level of dissatisfaction peaks in the reproductive period, reflecting the importance of behaviors on lifetime reproductive success in the same period. The empirical results support all the hypotheses. Regression analyses using the British Household Panel Survey show that the impact of income or spouse/partner situation on overall life satisfaction is greatest around thirty years of age, and that the baseline level of overall life satisfaction is U-shaped in age, with the lowest point in midlife.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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