This paper constructs an evacuation decision-making model that takes cognitive dissonance into consideration. The purpose of this construction is to clarify the psychological mechanism for the evacuation behavior of residents during an emergency, based on Akerlof and Dickens (Akerlof and Dickens Am Econ Rev 72:307–319, 1982) "The economic consequences of cognitive dissonance". Specifically, we empirically explore people’s psychological mechanism (e.g., cognitive dissonance) for evacuation behavior when a tsunami disaster occurs. As a result, we show that the level of anxiety depends on the area where residents live and that the average anxiety of residents is mostly correlated with the level of damage of past disasters, and that it is affected also by the ages of residents. Since the level of anxiety largely affects an individual’s evacuation behavior, this result can indicate for what kinds of people intervention and assistance are required based on the level of anxiety. A high level of anxiety basically promotes evacuation. Since our results show that anxiety is increased by the experience of tsunamis, education having people virtually experience tsunamis may increase evacuation rates efficiently.

This paper studies approximation of probabilistic distributions behind discrete-time linear systems with stochastic dynamics for advances in control of the systems. We discuss two approximation methods leading to optimal discrete distributions whose errors from the probabilistic distribution behind the system are minimal in the sense of the L ∞ and L 1 norms of the differences between associated cumulative distribution functions. The effectiveness of those approximation methods is demonstrated with numerical examples, in which the methods are compared with another simple method of constructing discrete distributions based on random sampling.

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This paper constructs an evacuation decision-making model that takes cognitive dissonance into consideration. The purpose of this construction is to clarify the psychological mechanism for the evacuation behavior of residents during an emergency, based on Akerlof and Dickens (1982). Specifically, we empirically explore people’s psychological mechanism (e.g. cognitive dissonance) for evacuation behavior when a tsunami disaster occurs. As a result, we show that the level of anxiety depends on the area where residents live and that the average anxiety of residents is mostly correlated to the level of damage of past disasters, and that it is affected also by the ages of residents. Since the level of anxiety largely affects an individual’s evacuation behavior, this result can indicate for what kinds of people intervention and assistance are required based on the level of anxiety.