This study aims to reexamine the relationship between altruistic orientation and individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental goods using contingent valuation. Altruistic motivation is known to be an important determinant of WTP. In the attitudinal scales used in previous research, the context of questions about altruistic motivations is specific to environmental issues. Instead, this study employs other psychological scales that measure altruistic orientation in a more general context, independently from environmental issues. The result is consistent with previous studies, but the impact of altruistic orientation is rather limited. This difference suggests that the context of questions may enhance respondents' consciousness about the environment and bump up the value of their WTP.

At present, applying text mining techniques to educational data is attracting much research attention. The present study uses text mining techniques to examine posters prepared by university freshmen in engineering fields to present their learning programs and their career goals after graduation, under the expectation that important keywords worth identifying lurked in the posters. The results showed that even though the participating students were only three months into their university education, their learning programs and career goals were already rather concrete and well adapted to the fields and courses they had chosen. Some of them had a remarkably good command of technical engineering terms.

This study investigates the effect of social rewards and sanctions on cooperation by examining a voluntary contribution mechanism used in conjunction with ex post communication. The experiment consists of two stages. In the first stage, paired subjects play a standard public-good game; in the second, each of them evaluates his or her partner's contribution in the first stage and sends a free-form written message to him or her. The experimental results show that the mere presence of an opportunity to praise or blame is not enough to promote cooperation. However, once subjects actually experience being blamed, they contribute significantly more in the following round. When disapproval is expressed in the subject's own words, unlike in previous studies, social sanctions were found to have a stronger impact on cooperation. The experience of being praised, in contrast, does not have such an effect. These results suggest that subjects may be more sensitive to the disutility of being blamed than to the utility of being praised.

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This study experimentally investigates two possible reasons for cooperative investment decisions in common pool resource games with two players. One reason is strategic behavior: subjects, who are allowed to interact with their partners repeatedly, attempt to build a long-term relationship and elicit cooperation from their partners. Another reason is a sense of intimacy: as the pairings of subjects are fixed throughout the experiment, subjects develop a sense of intimacy with their partners and make decisions by considering their benefit. The results suggest that cooperative decisions can be explained almost solely by subjects' strategic behaviors; however, the hypothesis that a sense of intimacy governed cooperative investment was not supported.