Between 2008 and 2010 the government identified 69 “resource depleted cities” of which 19 – more than one quarter – are in the northeastern provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang. Once the heart of China's heavy industry, the country's northeast is in trouble; its oil fields and steel mills are struggling, and its coal mining sector is in chronic decline.This article originated as part of a Special Report on economic decline and rejuvenation in China's former coal belt. In part two photographer Stam Lee explores Fuxin, a hollowed out pit town pinning its hopes on wind power in photo essay, accompanied by a report co-authored with chinadialogue reporter Feng Hao who expanded it for the Asia-Pacific Journal. In old mining villages near the pits of Fuxin in Liaoning Province in China's northeast you can still find former miners like Huang Anyuan (above), who worked in coal mines for 30 years (Image: Stam Lee)

The extant microeconomic literature on matching markets assumes ordinal preferences for matches, while bargaining within matches is mostly excluded. Central for this paper, however, is bargaining over joint profits from potential matches. We investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, a seemingly simple allocation task in a 2 × 2 market with repeated negotiations. When inefficiency is possible, about 1/3 of the complete matches are inefficient and, overall, more than 3/4 of the experimental allocations are unstable. These results strongly contradict existing bargaining theories requiring efficient matches. Even with regard to efficient matches, the tested theories perform poorly. Standard bargaining and behavioral concepts, such as Selten's (1972) Equal Division Core, are outperformed by the simplistic ɛ-Equal Split, i.e., an equal split of the joint profit plus/minus ɛ.

We examine strategic sophistication using eight two-person 3 × 3 one-shot games. To facilitate strategic thinking, we design a ‘structured’ environment where subjects first assign subjective values to the payoff pairs and state their beliefs about their counterparts’ probable strategies, before selecting their own strategies in light of those deliberations. Our results show that a majority of strategy choices are inconsistent with the equilibrium prediction, and that only just over half of strategy choices constitute best responses to subjects’ stated beliefs. Allowing for other-regarding considerations increases best responding significantly, but the increase is rather small. We further compare patterns of strategies with those made in an ‘unstructured’ environment in which subjects are not specifically directed to think strategically. Our data suggest that structuring the pre-decision deliberation process does not affect strategic sophistication.

The compromise effect arises when being close to the “middle” of a choice set makes an option more appealing. The compromise effect poses conceptual and practical problems for economic research: by influencing choices, it can bias researchers’ inferences about preference parameters. To study this bias, we conduct an experiment with 550 participants who made choices over lotteries from multiple price lists (MPLs). Following prior work, we manipulate the compromise effect to influence choices by varying the middle options of each MPL. We then estimate risk preferences using a discrete-choice model without a compromise effect embedded in the model. As anticipated, the resulting risk preference parameter estimates are not robust, changing as the compromise effect is manipulated. To disentangle risk preference parameters from the compromise effect and to measure the strength of the compromise effect, we augment our discrete-choice model with additional parameters that represent a rising penalty for expressing an indifference point further from the middle of the ordered MPL. Using this method, we estimate an economically significant magnitude for the compromise effect and generate robust estimates of risk preference parameters that are no longer sensitive to compromise-effect manipulations.

Charness and Dufwenberg (Am. Econ. Rev. 101(4):1211–1237, 2011) have recently demonstrated that cheap-talk communication raises efficiency in bilateral contracting situations with adverse selection. We replicate their main finding and extend their design to include competition between agents. We find that communication and competition act as “substitutes:” communication raises efficiency in the absence of competition but not with competition, and competition raises efficiency without communication but lowers efficiency with communication. We briefly review some behavioral theories that have been proposed in this context and show that each can explain some but not all features of the observed data patterns. Our findings highlight the fragility of cheap-talk communication and may serve as a guide to refine existing behavioral theories.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik committed one of the most devastating acts of mass murder by an individual in history. Over the course of one day, he killed 77 people in and around Oslo, Norway, through a combination of a car bomb and shootings. The latter took place on the island of Utøya, where 69 people died, most of them teenagers attending an event sponsored by the Workers' Youth League. During his subsequent trial, Breivik remained outwardly unemotional as he clearly recounted the events of the day, including the dozens of methodical execution-style shootings on the island. His calmness both on the day of the murders and during the trial, shocked many observers. It was also an important factor in an attempt to declare Breivik insane, a move that he successfully resisted. Breivik himself addressed this subject at some length, crediting his supposed ability to suppress anxiety and the fear of death through concentrated practice of what he called “bushido meditation.” He claimed to have begun this practice in 2006 to “deemotionalize” himself in preparation for a suicide attack. According to Breivik, his meditation was based on a combination of “Christian prayer” and the “bushido warrior codex.” Bushido, or “the way of the warrior,” is often portrayed as an ancient moral code followed by the Japanese samurai, although the historical evidence shows that it is largely a twentieth-century construct.

There is substantial evidence that risky decision-making involves a stochastic error process. The literature has adopted different approaches to address this issue, however, risk preferences are not uniquely identified by the most popular methods; decision error is not predicted to monotonically decrease with risk aversion. This paper reports the results of an experiment that elicits risk preferences to identify risk averse individuals and evaluates the frequency the stochastically dominant of two lotteries is chosen. Risk averse subjects exhibit a strong preference for dominant lotteries. More importantly, violations are consistent with stochastic decision error that decreases with risk aversion.

So rank are the injustices wrought upon Okinawa, and so long continuing, that I am led to conjecture that the reason the world pays so little attention to the issues and makes such muted criticism of the governments largely responsible for the injustices must be that the situation is so complex and so little-reported as to defy understanding. Historians and political scientists pay close attention to the East China Sea, but tend to see it, and the military conflicts that occur around it, through the prism of the nation state. In what follows, I look at the present and recent past of the “Okinawa problem” through the prism of Okinawa, paying closest attention to how the Okinawan people see their recent past and present. I focus especially on the years of the (second) Abe Shinzo government (beginning December 2012).

Recent decades have seen a rise in religious nationalism around the world, and Japan is no exception. Over the past two decades there has been a significant rightward shift in Japanese politics and this trend is closely related to organized religion and its affiliated political efforts to “recover” or “restore” what had been destroyed during the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-52). Our focus here is on the close connection between the Association of Shintō Shrines (Jinja Honchō) and many politicians belonging to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). This Association, which was organized in 1946, has some 80,000 affiliated shrines throughout the country and has been the base institution for Shintō nationalism throughout the postwar period.

This Diary written by twentieth-generation sake brewer of Futaba, Tomisawa Shūhei, from March 11, 2011 until April 21, 2011, depicts the experience of his family as they navigated the forced evacuation of their ancestral home as a result of the disastrous nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The Diary is translated to reflect the original and only occasionally adds names or descriptions for clarity.

The Coronavirus hit Japan during our study-abroad semester in Kyoto. Here we present similarities in Japanese societal response to chemical pollutants throughout the long twentieth century and to COVID-19, as they became apparent to us through a chemistry course on Japanese industrial pollution.

Laboratory experiments are frequently used to examine the nature of individuals’ social and risk preferences and inform economic theory. However, it is unknown whether the preferences of volunteer participants are representative of the population from which the participants are drawn, or whether they differ due to selection bias. To answer this question, we measured the preferences of 1,173 students in a classroom experiment using a trust game and a lottery choice task. Separately, we invited all students to participate in a laboratory experiment using common recruitment procedures. To evaluate whether there is selection bias, we compare the social and risk preferences of students who eventually participated in a laboratory experiment to those who did not, and find that they do not differ significantly. However, we also find that people who sent less in a trust game were more likely to participate in a laboratory experiment, and discuss possible explanations for this behavior.

In this collection of essays our authors explore a range of issues not covered in Part 1, examining the broader impact of the Olympic Movement, efforts to spin the message and whether hosting the games is worth the extravagant costs. Two authors focus on the Paralympics, another presents excerpts from a graphic guide to the Olympics while others delve into previous Olympics, what they represented and how they influence the 2020 games. There are also several essays on opposition to the Olympics and lingering concerns about how the government has managed the Fukushima nuclear accident. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic casts an ominous shadow over the games, amid concerns that Prime Minister Abe is sacrificing public health through inaction and minimizing risks in order to save the Olympics. - Jeff Kingston, Editor

Triggered by globalization, internationalization, and multiculturalism, Japanese ultra-nationalist groups spread hate targeting Zainichi Koreans and other minorities. The focus of this paper is not the traditional manifestation of hate speech between the socially powerful and the seemingly powerless, but women who openly perform hate speech in the name of love of country. It examines Japanese women's groups whose objective is to nurture patriotic awareness under the guise of sustaining culture and tradition. They discover a sense of legitimate social empowerment aiming to restore “historical truth” and uphold their country's honor and dignity for their children's sake.

Using a simple one-shot bribery game simulating petty corruption exchanges, we find evidence of a negative externality effect and a framing effect. When the losses suffered by third parties due to a bribe being offered and accepted are high and the game is presented as a petty corruption scenario instead of in abstract terms bribes are less likely to be offered. Higher negative externalities are also associated with less bribe acceptance. However, framing has no effect on bribe acceptance, indicating that the issue of artificiality may be of particular importance in bribery experiments.

This edited transcript of conversations among a group of scholars and practitioners is the culmination of a multi-year, multi-platform dialogue intended to capture the work and motivations of memory activists towards addressing both historical justice and current social and political needs of Asian American communities.

In Japan, Covid-19 has led to an accelerating diffusion of all-hazard, disaster-resilient, policy integration. This paper shows that Japanese experts not only built a resource-efficient Covid-19 response, but are also using the crisis to ramp up Japanese-style collaboration on resource-efficient and sustainable communities, both in Japan and overseas. In a year when action on the climate challenge everywhere risks being derailed, Japan's initiatives are an important indicator of how it remains possible to stay on track. Japan's measures further integrate the UN 2030 Agenda's three pillars of the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Sendai Framework of Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR). In short, Japan is using the pandemic as yet another opportunity to accelerate transformative industrial policy.

The three dissertation essays investigate different aspects of reputation in games where fairness is an important consideration. The first essay studies the effects of reputation on indirect reciprocity in different dictator games. The first experiment places dictators in two environments where they can either give money to the paired player or take money away from them: in one treatment the paired player is a stranger and in the other treatment the dictator has information on the paired player's reputation. Contrary to anecdotal evidence, the statistical tests show that the dictators’ behavior towards a stranger is not statistically significantly different from their behavior towards an individual with an established reputation. The findings arise because a high proportion of dictators acted purely in their own self interest in both treatments. The data also provides evidence that dictators are more generous when they know that their choices (but not their identities) will be revealed in the future. In the second experiment the dictators’ choices were restricted to only generous actions. In such environment the dictators sent more money on average to recipients with a reputation for being generous than to recipients without a reputation.

The second essay explores the ways in which information about others’ actions affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The experimental design discriminates behaviorally between three possible effects of recipient's within-game reputation on the dictator's decision: reputation causing indirect reciprocity, social influence, and identification. The separation of motives helps to identify the mechanisms of social transmission of impulses towards selfish or generous behavior. The data analysis reveals that the reputation effects have a stronger impact on dictators’ actions than social influence and identification.

In the third essay we examine the reputation effects in a labor market setting by analyzing the influence of negative technological shocks on long run relationships between firms and workers. The positive correlation between wage and effort in static conditions has been demonstrated in many experimental studies and has been one of the prominent explanations for the existence of wage rigidity. We subject these findings to further tests in a non-stationary environment that better corresponds to outside-the-lab market conditions. We observe the positive correlation of wages and effort but do not find support for downward wage rigidity in our data. Once the shocks occur, firms lower the wages and relationships often break down. The workers who accept a lower wage respond with exerting a lower effort.