This paper investigates whether the Japanese voters became happy and/or unhappy due to the results of the General Election in 2009. We conducted a daily web survey for seven days before and after the election, obtaining 1068 responses. Estimating a fixed effects model, we found that supporters of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the winner, became significantly happier, and supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) and New Komeito, the losers, became significantly unhappier on the day following the election. However, happiness returned to the previous level in one or two days, implying people adapted to the news very quickly. Dividing those who support the policies of DPJ into two groups, those who expect material benefits from the victory of DPJ and those who do not, we demonstrated that the reason why the supporters of the winner (DPJ) felt happy was not because they obtained material benefits from the change of government. We also found that the happiness level of those whose expectation of the election results were realized did not change, while that of those whose expectation differed from the reality changed substantially. In a word, only unexpected results matter.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. However, in many economic experiments on declining impatience so far, two elements, delay and interval, are mixed. To measure time discount rate in experiments, three timings should be distinguished-now, earlier option, and later option. Because "now" is fixed, two quantities define the situation fully; delay represents time difference between now and an earlier option, and interval represents time difference between earlier and later options. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayAlthough time discount rates may depend on these two factors, most experiments did not distinguish them. Nevertheless, the researchers interpreted their results indicating that time discount rates solely depend on the delay, and reported that per-period time discount rate decreases as the delay increases. However, people's discounting may depend heavily on the interval, not on the delay, so that decision-making may be time consistent.Read (2001) has already pointed out this problem. He divided the total interval (18 months) into three subintervals (six months each) and compared discount rates to find "subadditive time discounting" that a product of three discount rates (plus unity) for subintervals is higher than the discount rate (plus unity) for the total interval. Read (2001) denied the declining impatience because of lack of evidence when intervals are controlled.1 This paper does not consider the case of endogenous time discount rate (Uzawa, 1968). If time discount rate of an individual changes over time, which he or she does not know ex ante, his or her decision making may be time inconsistent. However, these cases are not objects of this paper. 2According to Read (2001), who investigated declining impatience by distinguishing the delay from interval, decision making of human beings is time consistent. Declining impatience or hyperbolic discounting, which is a standard model in psychology and physiological neuroscience as well as in behavioral economics, has not indeed had a firm empirical foundation.The purpose of this paper is to elucidate whether declining impatience is really a behavioral character of human beings. To achieve this, we requested subjects to choose one of the two options: an earlier option where one can get a smaller reward sooner; and a later option where one can get a larger reward, but later. Specifying these options, we control the following three factors: (1) the amount of reward, (2) the interval, and (3) the delay. Declining impatience is a featu...

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractStudies in psychology have long argued the possibility that sibling structure, such as birth order and the gender of siblings, shapes one's feminine and masculine personality traits, such as a preference for competition. In light of recent developments in the economics literature on the gender gap, this implies that familial environment could explain why some women do opt for competition, while the vast majority of women do not and, thus, are underrepresented on the career ladder. By conducting a controlled experiment on Japanese high school students, this study quantifies the impact of sibling structure on one's preference for competition, and examines whether a long-debated sibling hypothesis in psychology is supported from the viewpoint of experimental economics. Consistent with the hypothesis, our results reveal that men with older sisters were significantly less likely to enter a competitive environment compared with only sons. This effect is comparable in size to the effect of being female on the decision to compete. Our study also found moderate evidence that women with younger brothers were more likely to compete than only daughters.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C91, D03, J16