Update February 24, 2014.

Since our article appeared, there have been several developments that demand the reader's attention. The scale of electoral interference was found to have been more extensive than we originally reported. Last December, prosecutors investigating the case disclosed that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) had produced over a period of two years leading up to the election some 1900 online posts and approximately 22 million Tweets with political or election-related content-roughly 30% of all election-related content that was generated on Twitter. This was circulated by agents of the NIS's psychological warfare team and hired contractors.

This paper compares behavior under four different implementations of infinitely repeated games in the laboratory: the standard random termination method [proposed by Roth and Murnighan (J Math Psychol 17:189–198, 1978)] and three other methods that de-couple the expected number of rounds and the discount factor. Two of these methods involve a fixed number of repetitions with payoff discounting, followed by random termination [proposed by Sabater-Grande and Georgantzis (J Econ Behav Organ 48:37–50, 2002)] or followed by a coordination game [proposed in (Andersson and Wengström in J Econ Behav Organ 81:207–219, 2012; Cooper and Kuhn in Am Econ J Microecon 6:247–278, 2014a)]. We also propose a new method—block random termination—in which subjects receive feedback about termination in blocks of rounds. We find that behavior is consistent with the presence of dynamic incentives only with methods using random termination, with the standard method generating the highest level of cooperation. Subject behavior in the other two methods display two features: a higher level of stability in cooperation rates and less dependence on past experience. Estimates of the strategies used by subjects reveal that across implementations, even when the discount rate is the same, if interactions are expected to be longer defection increases and the use of the Grim strategy decreases.

This article examines the origins and development of the US “forever wars” in recent decades, and its implications both for democracy and warfare.

The “collective action problem” describes situations where each person in a group can individually profit more by withholding contributions to group goals. However, if all act in their material self-interest no public good is produced and all are worse off. I present a new solution to the collective action problem based on status. I argue that contributions to collective action increase an individual's status in the group because contributions create perceptions of high group motivation, defined as the relative value an individual places on group versus individual welfare. Individuals are predicted to receive a variety of social and material benefits for their contributions to the group. These rewards can help explain why individuals contribute to collective action.

Four laboratory studies tested the theory. In Study 1, following interaction in a 6- person public goods game, participants reported viewing higher contributors as more group motivated and higher status. Higher contributors also wielded more interpersonal influence in task interactions with participants. Participants also cooperated with higher contributors more, and allocated greater altruism to them in a Dictator game. Study 2 addressed an exchange-theoretic alternative explanation for the findings of Study 1, showing that observers of collective action who did not benefit from higher contributors’ contributions to the public good, nonetheless rated them as higher status, cooperated with them more, and gave them greater altruistic gifts. These results show that collective action contributors can earn social and material benefits even outside the group.

Study 3 more directly tested the mediating role of group motivation. Contributors who sacrificed a greater proportion of resources for the collective action were rated as more group motivated and higher status than a moderate proportional contributor, even though the amounts they contributed were the same. These findings support the theory, and underscore the significance of self-sacrifice in the acquisition of status in collective action.

Study 4 investigated the effects of status rewards on contributors’ behavior towards and perceptions of the group. Participants who received positive status feedback for their contributions subsequently contributed more than those who did not. Rewarded participants also identified more with the group and saw it as having greater solidarity and cohesion. I conclude by discussing theoretical implications and future research.

We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to that without competition. We further find that boys and girls are equally likely to self-select into competition in a verbal task, but that boys are significantly more likely to choose to compete in a mathematical task. This gender gap diminishes and becomes non-significant when we control for actual performance, beliefs about relative performance, and risk preferences, or for beliefs only. Girls are also more altruistic and less risk taking than boys.

The year 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Okinawa's reversion to Japan. This article examines the Japan Civil Liberties Union's 1955 solidarity activism on occupied Okinawa, which generated Japanese civil society's first awakening to the “Okinawa problem.” The Asahi Shinbun's front-page article on the organization's publication “Human Rights Problems in Okinawa” and its follow-up coverage triggered public debate influencing Japan/U.S. official policies on Okinawa. Drawing on archival evidence, the article illuminates the contested nature of Japanese activism caught between Cold War Asia and decolonizing Asia. It argues that the 1955 activist movement shaped the subsequent trajectory of Japanese engagement with the “Okinawa problem.”

Rationality is a fundamental pillar of Economics. It is however unclear if this assumption holds when decisions are made under stress. To answer this question, we design two laboratory experiments where we exogenously induce physiological stress in participants and test the consistency of their choices with economic rationality. In both experiments we induce stress with the Cold Pressor test and measure economic rationality by the consistency of participants’ choices with the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP). In the first experiment, participants delay the decision-making task for 20 min until the cortisol level peaks. We find significant differences in cortisol levels between the stressed group and the placebo group which, however, do not affect the consistency of choices with GARP. In a second experiment, we study the immediate effect of the stressor on rationality. Overall, results from the second experiment confirm that rationality is not impaired by the stressor. If anything, we observe that compared to the placebo group, participants are more consistent with rationality immediately after the stressor. Our findings provide strong empirical support for the robustness of the economic rationality assumption under physiological stress.

Much has been written on the government of Japan's determination to provide a new base for the United States Marine Corps at Henoko on Oura Bay in northern Okinawa and to transfer the existing, obsolescent, dangerous and inconvenient Futenma Air Station to it. When the agreement to “return” the Marine Corps' Futenma Air Station to Japan was first reached (April 12, 1996), it was to occur “within five to seven years.” As the 20th anniversary of that agreement loomed early in 2016, the Marine Corps' “Marine Aviation Plan 2016” amended the already several times pushed back transfer/reversion date to “fiscal year 2025” (October 2024-September 2025). Admiral Harry Harris, Commander-of US Pacific forces presented that date in evidence to Congress early in 2016. But even as that 2025 date was being reluctantly accepted in Washington, at the beginning of March 2016, Japan despatched its top security official, Yachi Shotaro, to Washington to seek the Obama government's understanding (and presumably also its permission) for a further substantial delay. Once the US consented, the Abe government came to an “out-of-court” March 4 agreement (discussed in this paper and in the following opinion essays by Okinawans) with Okinawa Prefecture, that involved a complete and indefinite suspension of site works at Henoko. Lt. General Robert Neller, commander of the US Marine Corps, told a Senate military affairs committee meeting that that suspension could be expected to last a further 12-months. President Obama, advised of the impending delay, merely responded with “So there will be nothing happening for a while then.”

Between 1894 and 1936, Imperial Japan fought several “small wars” against Tonghak Rebels, Taiwanese millenarians, Korean Righteous Armies, Germans in Shandong, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, and “bandits” in Manchuria. Authoritative accounts of Japanese history ignore these wars, or sanitize them as “seizures,” “cessions,” or occasions for diplomatic maneuvers. The consigning the empire's “small wars” to footnotes (at best) has in turn promoted a view that Japanese history consists of alternating periods of “peacetime” (constitutionalism) and “wartime” (militarism), in accord with the canons of liberal political theory. However, the co-existence of “small wars” with imperial Japan's iconic wars indicates that Japan was a nation at war from 1894 through 1945. Therefore, the concept “Forever War” recommends itself for thinking about militarism and democracy as complementary formations, rather than as opposed forces. The Forever-War approach emphasizes lines of continuity that connect “limited wars” (that mobilized relatively few Japanese soldiers and civilians, but were nonetheless catastrophic for the colonized and occupied populations on the ground) with “total wars” (that mobilized the whole Japanese nation against the Qing, imperial Russia, nationalist China, and the United States). The steady if unspectacular operations of Forever War– armed occupations, settler colonialism, military honor-conferral events, and annual ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine–continued with little interruption even during Japan's golden age of democracy and pacifism in the 1920s. This article argues that Forever War laid the infrastructural groundwork for “total war” in China from 1937 onwards, while it produced a nation of decorated, honored, and mourned veterans, in whose names the existing empire was defended at all costs against the United States in the 1940s. In Forever War—whether in imperial Japan or elsewhere–soldiering and military service become ends in themselves, and “supporting the troops” becomes part of unthinking, common sense.

Characterized as everything from a great power to a reactive state, Japan faces many diplomatic challenges. Nevertheless, Japan has become increasingly active on the international stage, reflecting a subtle shift from “exclusive bilateralism to modest multilateralism” (Mulgan 2008). Yet, especially in the Asia-Pacific, contemporary multilateralism is itself challenged geopolitically, geoeconomically, and geoculturally. In this strategic context, and particularly in response to great power contestation, “minilaterals” have proliferated, with Japan keen to join. Although current regional minilaterals are critiqued as creating as many problems as they resolve, restricting the agenda-setting of second-tier powers like Japan, a geopolynomic perspective illustrates how alternative policy prescriptions for leadership include non-traditional security minilaterals and regional international commissions.

When every individual’s effort imposes negative externalities, self-interested behavior leads to socially excessive effort. To curb these excesses when effort cannot be monitored, competing output-sharing partnerships can form. With the right-sized groups, aggregate effort falls to the socially optimal level. We investigate this theory experimentally and find that while it makes correct qualitative predictions, there are systematic quantitative deviations, always in the direction of the socially optimal investment. Using data on subjects’ conjectures of each other’s behavior we investigate altruism, conformity and extremeness aversion as possible explanations. We show that deviations are consistent with both altruism and conformity (but not extremeness aversion).

This essay considers how insights into the dynamic, interconnected, and high-stakes nature of frontier markets resonate with current disruptions in global commodity networks. In the book Unsettled Frontiers (Cornell University Press, 2022), I argue that the tangled social and material networks that constitute frontier markets are prone to rupture—a characteristic that holds significant implications for frontier landscapes and communities. Such processes of rupture—consequential and unequal in their effects—are evident in the disruptions we now see in the wake of Covid-19 and the broader unfolding of our current nature–society crisis.

An oblique tooth is viewed in the United States as requiring straightening, but in Japan it may be thought of as emblematic of a young woman's charm. While a slim body is a prerequisite for beauty today East and West, plump women were considered beautiful in Tang dynasty (618-907) China and Heian (794-1185) Japan. Starting from around the twelfth century in China, bound feet symbolized the attractiveness of women. But Japan, which received sundry influences from China, never adopted foot binding. Instead, shaving eyebrows and blackening teeth became markers of feminine beauty. Before modern times, neither Japanese nor Chinese paid much attention to double eyelids, but in the course of the long twentieth century, they became a standard for distinguishing beautiful from plain women. Thus criteria of beauty greatly differ by era and culture, and therein lies many riddles.

We use experiments to investigate the efficacy of recommended play and performance bonuses in resolving coordination failures in a stag-hunt type coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria, often referred to as a “weak link” game. Participants routinely find it difficult to coordinate to the payoff-dominant outcome in such games. We look at performance in both fixed and randomly re-matched groups. A recommendation to the payoff-dominant outcome is successful in resolving coordination failures with fixed groups but only when this recommendation is “common knowledge” in the sense that all members of the group receive the same message and it is read out loud for everyone to hear. Resolving coordination failures is harder with randomly re-matched groups and the greatest success is achieved only upon payment of a performance bonus.

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the One Belt and One Road Initiative, commonly known as the Belt and Road Initiative. The initiative proposed ‘peaceful development’ and ‘economic cooperation’ connecting Asia, Europe and Africa. Within this framework, the establishment of the ‘China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC)‘ is envisaged as a promising step toward regional connectivity and economic development in Eurasia through the territory of Mongolia. This article analyzes the BRI projects to identify opportunities and challenges to creating the Corridor in Mongolia. The data draw on both primary and secondary sources.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the protection of intellectual property (IP) incentivizes people to create non-rivalrous knowledge goods, foregoing the production of other rivalrous goods. In the contrasting treatment with no IP protection, participants are free to resell and remake non-rivalrous knowledge goods originally created by others. We find that creators reap substantial profits when IP is protected and that rampant pirating is common when there is no IP protection, but IP protection in and of itself is neither necessary nor sufficient for generating wealth from the discovery of knowledge goods. Rather, individual entrepreneurship is the key.

Masako Robbins' intimate personal account of her life in pre-war, wartime, and early postwar Okinawa compels the reader to experience the history of this tumultuous era from the perspective of the daughter in an impoverished family. Sold as a child by her father to a brothel in the 1930s, and drafted by the Japanese military as a combat nurse during the Battle of Okinawa, she barely survived after being trapped in a cave collapsed by shelling. Placed in a refugee camp at the end of the battle, her family later returned to their village to find their home destroyed. Her strength, resourcefulness, and resilience throughout these horrifying ordeals are nothing short of astounding. Now eighty-six years old and living in Yuma, Arizona, Masako learned enough English after coming with her first husband to the United States in 1952 to write this memoir in English. In 1964 she met Warren and Mieko Rucker who, together with Karen King, edited the text, a portion of which is presented below.

Contemporary readers are most familiar with George Orwell's later works of political satire, such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Less known is the fact that the writer, who is often considered the epitome of ‘Englishness’, was born in India and as a young man served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma—an experience that reverberated throughout his oeuvre. In Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), Douglas Kerr offers the first comprehensive study of Orwell's writing about the East and of the East in his writing

In experiments with two-person sequential games we analyze whether responses to favorable and unfavorable actions depend on the elicitation procedure. In our “hot” treatment the second player responds to the first player's observed action while in our “cold” treatment we follow the “strategy method” and have the second player decide on a contingent action for each and every possible first player move, without first observing this move. Our analysis centers on the degree to which subjects deviate from the maximization of their pecuniary rewards, as a response to others’ actions. Our results show no difference in behavior between the two treatments. We also find evidence of the stability of subjects’ preferences with respect to their behavior over time and to the consistency of their choices as first and second mover.

During the Meiji Period (1868-1912) the Japanese government hired thousands of foreign employees to accelerate modernization. Many employees were buried at Tokyo's Aoyama Cemetery. In recent times, the government issued notices of delinquent management fees for those graves whose descendants have not continued to pay for the graves' upkeep. Threatening to re-bury these employees elsewhere, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has been engaged in a dispute with a small organization committed to retaining the employees' legacy. Utilizing firsthand interviews with those directly involved, this article analyzes that conflict—of history, economic development, memory, and memorialization—as a struggle between the “spirits” of the foreign employees and the spirit of Japan's modernization.