More than a decade has gone since public choice classes became established in curriculums of economics, law and political science departments in Japanese universities. At the same time, subjects on public choice are frequently argued in the classes of economic policy, public finance, political science, public policy, and so on.
Public choice is introduced as an analytical tool to describe political decision makings, and, in many cases, the class in such departments proceeds to name topics on democratic political decision makings. The paradox of voting and not voting, single-peakedness, median voter theorem, rational ignorance of voters, rent seeking, capture theory, flypaper effects, political business cycles and fiscal deficit tendency under democratic governments are enumerations. Public choice lectured in these classes is regarded as a discipline to explain a real decision making process.
In addition to the rising recognition of public choice in academic societies, the reason why public choice gained such a position in curriculums is that it furnishes the presuppositions of methodological individualism just the same as economics and provides seamless analyses connecting markets and political processes.
In these decades, many policy oriented departments are inaugurated in Japan. Under globalization, universities must meet the request to turn out the human resources who can skillfully deal with the problems confronting and solve it. Research themes of public choice are realization of agreements within rational actors under conflicting interests, and they may correspond to the request.
But unfortunately, only empirical researches of public choice are referred in many classes, and once entering into the stage of recommending policies, the class in policy oriented departments proceeds, deviated from the presuppositions of self-interested political actors, to an ‘ideal’ policy for a hypothetical government ruled by an omniscient despot.
Taking account of the social requirement for university graduates under globalization, policy recommendations in a policy oriented curriculum must be corresponded to the core presuppositions of public choice. These policy recommendations under ‘ideal’ government model may be afford to choose ‘correct’ answers under a certain methodological setting, but they cannot deliver policies which solve problems in democratic societies. With this meaning they are in the category of an old knowledge-oriented education.
In the setting of a constitutional contract, constitutional political economy shows the process of unanimous agreement to set up a government to get rid of the situation of mutual disadvantage. Policy recommendations of public choice must be made to re-constrict governments by people under the situation of mutual disadvantage just like that of under the constitutional contract.

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In this paper, I demonstrate “the bargaining power theory of the state” presented by Ueda(2008, 2009) is applicable to nomadic societies. Ueda (2008, 2009) presented the “bargaining power theory of the state” based on historical and archeological studies of irrigation societies that there existed not only intra-society trades but also inter-society trades before sate foundation. I can summarize the main hypothesis of this theory as follows: (1) Irrigation societies can be modeled with hierarchical cooperation game.
(2) Intra-society trades within irrigation societies can be characterized as the structure of “infinite repeated game” and have a stable nature.(3) If the preceding irrigation societies often fell into disadvantageous positions in intersociety trades with supplier of necessary goods e.g. iron resources owing to weak bargaining power, the chiefs of irrigation societies were motivated to organize a state organ with a regular military force to make themselves more advantageous positions in the intersociety trades.(4) If the payoff of the chiefs of irrigation societies with regular military force is larger than the payoff of the chiefs of preceding irrigation societies without regular military force, then the chiefs of preceding irrigation societies transform them into a state.
The origins of nomadic state have been explained by the “predatory theory of the state”. However, there exist some counterexamples in human histories, e.g. cooperative activities among nomadic tribes for predatory activities. These cooperative activities must be organized by leaders of the nomadic societies for organizing military forces, that is, some state must be formed before the “predatory state” is formed in nomadic societies. The traditional predatory theory of the state never bridges the gap between the theory and these historical facts. In this paper I demonstrate that above four characteristics of “the bargaining-power theory of the state ” are applicable to nomadic societies and the origins of nomadic state are explained by this theory consistent with historical and archeological studies.

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Heterogeneity influences the transmission of information among group members. By conducting a survey of mothers with children in kindergartens, we examine whether heterogeneity among mothers influences the degree of information exchange in the classroom. We find that mothers exchange information less frequently when there is a larger difference in their ages. Further, we find that wealthy and well-educated mothers utilize information more intensively. The results suggest that the characteristics of mothers determine the ability of social learning.

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