We study the effect of group size on cooperation in voluntary contribution mechanism games. As in previous experiments, we study four- and eight-person groups in high and low marginal per capita return (MPCR) conditions. We find a positive effect of group size in the low MPCR condition, as in previous experiments. However, in the high MPCR condition we observe a negative group size effect. We extend the design to investigate two- and three-person groups in the high MPCR condition, and find that cooperation is highest of all in two-person groups. The findings in the high MPCR condition are consistent with those from n-person prisoner’s dilemma and oligopoly experiments that suggest it is more difficult to sustain cooperation in larger groups. The findings from the low MPCR condition suggest that this effect can be overridden. In particular, when cooperation is low other factors, such as considerations of the social benefits of contributing (which increase with group size), may dominate any negative group size effect.

We propose a simple adaptive learning model to study behavior in the call market. The laboratory environment features buyers and sellers who receive a new random value or cost in each period, so they must learn a strategy that maps these random draws into bids or asks. We focus on buyers’ adjustment of the “mark-down” ratio of bids relative to private value and sellers’ adjustment of the corresponding “mark-up” ratio of asks relative to private cost. The learning model involves partial adjustment of these ratios towards the ex post optimum each period. The model explains a substantial proportion of the variation in traders’ strategies. Parameter estimates indicate strong recency effects and negligible autonomous trend, but strongly asymmetric response to different kinds of ex post error. The asymmetry is only slightly attenuated in “observational learning” from other traders’ ex post errors. Simulations show that the model can account for the main systematic deviations from equilibrium predictions observed in this market institution and environment.

He stood among the Japanese soldiers wearing a weather-beaten visored cap over his short, dark hair and a rough hewn jacket covering his broad soldiers, a cigarette angling away from his square jaw and a camera dangling from his gloved hand. As they studied documents, the Japanese troops contrasted with Jack London in their box hats and high collared uniforms. A photographer present immortalized London looking like the adventurer and writer that he was, one drawn to the battle like a missionary to his calling, who skillfully recorded the machinations of great powers while sympathizing with the underdogs who struggled to survive.

An unofficial translation by C. Douglas Lummis of excerpts from Chapter 5 of Henoko ni kichi wa tsukurenai (A Base Cannot Be Built at Henoko) by Yamashiro Hiroji and Kitaueda Tsuyoshi (Iwanami Booklet No. 987, 2018). Comments and words added by the translator are placed in square brackets. Three dots indicate sections left out. The purpose of translating just this section is to show that the engineering difficulties faced by the Henoko base project are not the inventions/exaggerations of anti-base activists, but are based on hard scientific data. The data concerning the probable earthquake fault is the result of research carried out by seismologists; the data indicating height limit violations comes from the Okinawa Defense Bureau and has been supported by surveys carried out by skilled surveyors; the tests that produced the N-zero result for part of the sea bottom were also carried out by the Defense Bureau. CDL

Taiwan was surrendered to Imperial Japan by China's Qing dynasty in 1895, fifteen years prior to Japan's annexation of Korea. Like Korea, Taiwan's women and girls were subsequently conscripted into Japan's military “comfort women” (ianfu) system. The author notes significant differences between the treatment of the women in the two colonies and in the remembrance of the comfort woman systems. In Korea, dozens of comfort women statues and memorials commemorate the system's victims while not one such statue exists in Taiwan. In December 2016, eighteen years after Korea opened its first of two comfort women museums, the Ama (Grandmother) Museum was opened in Taipei. While the museum in Taipei chronicles the Taiwanese comfort women's plight, its message represents more than an indictment of Japan or a pursuit of redress for the system's victims. The museum and its sponsors find ways to apply the lessons of this tragedy to the ongoing challenges of human trafficking and domestic violence.

We perform an experiment which provides a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themselves. This game has two equilibria, if played once. In one of them, all players make effort and there is little redistribution. In the other one, there is no effort and nothing to redistribute. A solution to the repeated game allows for redistribution and high effort, sustained by the threat to revert to the worst of these equilibria. Our results show that redistribution with high effort is not sustainable. The main reason for the absence of redistribution is that rich agents do not act differently depending on whether the poor have worked hard or not. The equilibrium in which redistribution may be sustained by the threat of punishing the poor if they do not exert effort is not observed in the experiment. Thus, the explanation of the behavior of the subjects lies in Hobbes, not in Rousseau.

We develop a method to assess population knowledge about any given topic. We define, and rationalize, types of beliefs that form the ‘knowledge spectrum’. Using a sample of over 7000 UK residents, we estimate these beliefs with respect to three topics: an animal-based diet, alcohol consumption and immigration. We construct an information-campaign effectiveness index (ICEI) that predicts the success of an information campaign. Information resistance is greatest for animal-based diets, and the ICEI is highest for immigration. We test the predictive power of our ICEI by simulating information campaigns, which produces supportive evidence. Our method can be used by any government or company that wants to explore the success of an information campaign.

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.

This article examines how tropes of silence and seclusion were utilized both at the dawn of the Japanese imperial house and in its current iteration. Attempts to subjugate women and to subvert subjugation by women exist in the origin myths of Japan, and are repeated in the Heisei era.

The late Johnny Kitagawa was Japan's most successful talent mogul, enabled by an entertainment industry that turned a blind eye to his serial sexual abuse of children

As might be expected, the death of Johnny Kitagawa from a stroke on July 9th was met with grief and apparently genuine affection in Japan's entertainment industry. Kitagawa (87) had, after all, helmed arguably the country's most powerful talent agency. Johnny & Associates had ignited the careers of some of the best-loved Japanese pop acts of the last five decades, among them Four Leaves, Tanokin Trio, Hikaru Genji, SMAP, TOKIO, Kinki Kids and V6. Yakumaru Hirohide, a former member of Shibugakitai, an eighties boy band managed by Kitagawa, said he had “cried all night” on hearing about his death – a not untypical reaction.

This paper provides a contextualized reading of the South Korean 2016 hit drama ‘Descendants of the Sun’, the most prominent pop cultural manifestation of the Republic of Korea’s rising status as a global middle power. Through linking the fictional peacekeeping mission to a confidently nationalist conception of South Korean identity, the drama normalizes troop deployments by circumventing traditional narratives for legitimation. This argument rests on observations concerning the omission of any historical and UN context for the deployment, the Othering of the United States as main antagonist, and the unchallenged sense of righteousness and morality displayed by the main protagonists in an otherwise passive local setting.

You could not make these landscapes up and have people believe it. Even as fiction, no one would believe it. That is why, for over sixty years, I kept what I saw to myself… until the day others [who] spoke about it, were called liars, [supposedly] because the atom bombs could not have happened that way. For people underneath an A-bomb to have become shadows on the wall, and charcoals, before they could fall to the ground, no one wanted to believe it. But it happened.

In this article I seek to show that, while the Ryukyu shobun refers to the process by which the Meiji government annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom between 1872 and 1879, it can best be understood by investigating its antecedents in the Bakumatsu era and by viewing it in the wider context of East Asian and world history. I show that, following negotiations with Commodore Perry, the bakufu recognized the importance of claiming Japanese control over the Ryukyus. This study clarifies the changing nature of Japanese diplomacy regarding the Ryukyus from Bakumatsu in the late 1840s to early Meiji.

“When journalism is silent, literature must speak,” in the words of Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, whose reporting on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste (East Timor) broke the silence about the killings in Indonesia.

In 1965-66, as many as a million Indonesians, and perhaps more, died in a wave of violence following the seizure of power by General Suharto. The events are now well covered in scholarly work in English. Army officers spurred on killings of suspected leftists and many more were arrested for their political views, becoming “tapol” (political prisoners, from the Indonesian phrase tahanan politik). Several scholars have also pointed to the role of the United States government in encouraging the Indonesian army to carry out the mass killings, a complicity highlighted decades ago and confirmed by recently-declassified US government documents.

This article draws on material from Geoffrey Gunn's Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong: Anti-Colonial Networks, Extradition and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

This paper presents the results from a minimum-effort game in which individuals can observe the choices of others in real time. We find that under perfect monitoring almost all groups coordinate at the payoff-dominant equilibrium. However, when individuals can only observe the actions of their immediate neighbors in a circle network, monitoring improves neither coordination nor efficiency relative to a baseline treatment without real-time monitoring. We argue that the inefficacy of imperfect monitoring is due to information uncertainty, that is, uncertainty about the correct interpretation of a neighbor's actions. Information uncertainty prevents individuals from inferring safely that their group has managed to coordinate from the available information.

A well-known result from the theory of finitely repeated games states that if the stage game has a unique equilibrium, then there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium in the finitely repeated game in which the equilibrium of the stage game is being played in every period. Here I show that this result does in general not hold anymore if players have social preferences of the form frequently assumed in the recent literature, for example in the inequity aversion models of Fehr and Schmidt (Quartely Journal of Economics 114:817–868, 1999) or Bolton and Ockenfels (American Economic Review 100:166–193, 2000). In fact, repeating the unique stage game equilibrium may not be a subgame perfect equilibrium at all. This finding should have relevance for all experiments with repeated interaction, whether with fixed, random or perfect stranger matching.

We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List’s (in Journal of Political Economy 115(3):482–493, 2007) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator games with different taking options but equivalent final payoff possibilities. We find that recipients tend to earn more as the amount the dictator must take to achieve a given final payoff increases, a result consistent with the hypothesis that the cold prickle of taking is stronger than the warm glow of giving. We conclude that not taking is not equivalent to giving and agree with List (in Journal of Political Economy 115(3):482–493, 2007) that the current social preference models fail to rationalize the observed data.