The effects of background music and sound in economic decision making: Evidence from a laboratory experiment

This paper experimentally studies the effects of background music and sound on the preference of the decision makers for rewards in pairwise intertemporal choice tasks and lottery choice tasks. The participants took part in the current experiment, involving four treatments: (1) the familiar music treatment; (2) the unfamiliar music treatment; (3) the noise treatment and (4) the no music treatment. The experimental results confirm that background noise affects human performance in decision making under risk and intertemporal decision making, though the results do not indicate the significant familiarity effect that is a change of the preference in the presence of familiar background music and sound.Allais-type preferences; choice under risk; intertemporal choice; the familiarity effect

The Effects of Central Grants on Decentralized Social Programs: Post]2005 School Expense Assistance in Japan

This study examines the effects of central matching grants for the School Expense Assistance (SEA) in the midst of increasing child poverty in Japan. The 2005 reform replaced SEA grants with increases in general revenues through the system of Local Allocation Tax (LAT). By exploiting the facts that the replaced grants were closed]ended and that LAT disbursements were not made to every locality, we could not only identify the effects of the matching grants but also decompose the effects into price and income effects. We show that the 2005 change indeed suppressed SEA expenditures. The loss of matching grants reduced per]recipient SEA benefits by about JPN\5,000 (US56) for first]year elementary school students and JPN\12,000 (US133) for first]year junior high school students. The loss also reduced recipient percentage among students by 1.2-2.1 percentage points from 11.52 percent in 2004, although the eligibility criteria were barely affected.school expense assistance,fiscal transfers, differnce-in-difference, Japan

Germline recombination by conditional gene targeting with Parvalbumin-Cre lines

Conditional gene targeting allows us to study gene function in specific tissues or cell types. This is commonly achieved by Cre DNA recombinase and its 34–base pair target sequences called loxP sites. Through the efforts of individual labs and large-scale projects, a sizable collection of Cre mouse lines has been generated to express or delete specific genes in a wide range of cell types throughout the nervous sys-tem (Madisen et al., 2010; Taniguchi et al., 2011). Typically, the specificity of Cre transgene expression is controlled by tissue or cell-type promoters. However, increas-ing evidence has revealed that the desire

Neural-network-assisted in situ processing monitoring by speckle pattern observation

We propose a method to monitor the progress of laser processing using laser speckle patterns. Laser grooving and percussion drilling were performed using femtosecond laser pulses. The speckle patterns from a processing point were monitored with a high-speed camera and analyzed with a deep neural network. The deep neural network enabled us to extract multiple information from the speckle pattern without a need for analytical formulation. The trained neural network was able to predict the ablation depth with an uncertainty of 2 \micron, as well as the material under processing, which will be useful for composite material processing

The effects of background music and sound in economic decision making: Evidence from a laboratory experiment

This paper experimentally studies the effects of background music and sound on the preference of the decision makers for rewards in pairwise intertemporal choice tasks and lottery choice tasks. The participants took part in the current experiment, involving four treatments: (1) the familiar music treatment; (2) the unfamiliar music treatment; (3) the noise treatment and (4) the no music treatment. The experimental results confirm that background noise affects human performance in decision making under risk and intertemporal decision making, though the results do not indicate the significant familiarity effect that is a change of the preference in the presence of familiar background music and sound