In this paper, we propose an organization to promote both protection and utilization of personal information. Regarding personal information, there are those who want to strengthen the protection and those who want to promote utilization, and neither is in the optimum state. Those who want more protection are not exercising the options currently available, and those seeking utilization are not able to inform firms of their intentions. This is thought to be due to the high cost of obtaining consent for protection and utilization. This cost is a kind of transaction cost, therefore we will propose an organization of mediating users' consents to reduce it. The organization provides apps to consumers by which they can choose protection level of 5 levels. A conjoint analysis shows that about 50% to 60% of people are willing to use the organization, thus there is a good chance that this proposal will be accepted by the public.

The number of young victims of sexual crimes, enabled by Social Network Services, have increased in Japan. Several software applications (apps) have been provided to users to prevent such attacks. However, as these systems are “merit goods,” the market mechanisms for their adoption may not function properly. To increase the efficiency of service provision, the authors focus on revenue from indirect beneficiaries who are outside the scope of the conventional market mechanism, and investigate the additional social burden of such systems. We estimated and analyzed the willingness-to-donate (WTD) for a hypothetical “cyber risk notification app,” an application that uses artificial intelligence to notify users whether a text message received from a partner is of a good nature or not. We found that, on average, Japanese people have a positive WTD, but the preferences of donors vary widely, and favorable donation conditions and methods differ from those identified by previous studies conducted in other countries. These findings suggest that customer segmentation and targeting are as important for collecting donations in Japan as they are elsewhere, but some best practices from other countries do not work. However, this study has problem about response rate (60.5%), then further improved survey is required.

The number of foreign IT engineers working in Japan has significantly increased in 2000s. In particular, the increase in IT engineers from China and South Korea was remarkable. What was the inducement for the international labor mobility of Highly Skilled workers from East Asia to Japan?

In this paper, I focused on South Korea, where the government trained young people in its own country as IT engineers and actively send them out to Japan. There were two major background factors: first, due to Koreaʼs high university enrollment rate, university graduates were oversupplied in the labor market; second, the 1997 IMF currency crisis overlapped so that the youth unemployment rate deteriorated sharply.

As a countermeasure against a strong Yen in 1980s, the Japanese IT industry selected South Korea as one of its offshore partners. Business and technical tie-ups with a Japanese companies in the 1980s formed a corridor between Japan and Korea and it led to the expansion in 2000s.

In addition to factors on the Korean side, the foreign IT engineer acceptance policy on the Japanese side was behind the expansion of international labor mobility in the 2000s.

The Government of Japan sets multiple objectives for its open data strategy which are: 1) to ensure transparency and credibility of government; 2) to promote public participation and public-private collaboration; and 3) to revitalize the economy and to improve administrative efficiency. The aims of this study were to understand the current situation of local governments’ efforts from a comprehensive perspective not only 1) the release of public data but also 2) the public-private collaboration and 3) the use of open data in administration. We also examine the factors that affect the implementation of initiatives, especially focusing on the population size of municipalities and the Basic Act on the Advancement of Public and Private Sector Data Utilization. The findings suggest that the Act might only stimulate the release of data by small and medium size municipalities. The government should consider further measures including partnership with civic tech communities for facilitating public-private collaboration and data utilization.

In order to understand the resale activity of PlayStation5 buyers, we collected information about successful bids on the Yahoo Auctions site for a period of one and a half months from the release date to the end of December 2020, and analyzed the data. As a result of the large number of transactions for 4 days from the day of release, we were able to confirm about 600 transactions per day. From the number of sellersʼ transactions, it was found that sellers with one or two transactions accounted for 87% of the total. Most of the auction resale activities were by sellers who traded once or twice. Users were grouped based on the number of seller transactions, and profiles of the different groups were created. The groups could be categorized into three types: “store online sales,” “individual intermediate and advanced traders,” and “individual beginner traders”.