Willingness to Buy and/or Pay Disparity: Evidence from Fully Autonomous Vehicles

We seek to understand whether environmental concerns, fears of potential accidents, and merits regarding fully autonomous vehicles (FAVs) are motivators of willingness to buy (WTB) and willingness to pay (WTP) of FAVs. To do so, a large-scale survey on FAVs of more than 180,000 respondents was collected in Japan, and structural equation modeling (SEM) validated our findings. Interestingly, this study implicates a form of WTB-WTP disparity: those interested in natural environment conservation would purchase FAVs because they show high interest in overall social problems, and new technologies such as FAVs can resolve such problems, according to previous works. However, our result implies that they would not show high WTP because adopting FAVs does not `directly' contribute to natural environment conservation. Additionally, our results indicate that those who appreciate potential merits would have higher WTB and WTP, while those who fear FAV technology would not purchase FAVs and would have lower WTP. The results bear crucial policy implications for planners by showing the complexity between the factors of FAV WTB and WTP

Insuring Well-being: Psychological Adaptation to Disasters

We examine the impact of life and health insurance spending on subjective well-being. Taking advantage of insurance spending and subjective well-being data on more than 700,000 individuals in Japan, we examine whether insurance spending can buffer declines in subjective well-being due to exposure to mass disaster. We find that insurance spending can buffer drops in subjective well-being by approximately 3-6% among those who experienced the mass disaster of the great East Japan earthquake. Subjective health increases the most, followed by life satisfaction and happiness. On the other hand, insurance spending decreases the subjective well-being of those who did not experience the earthquake by approximately 3-7%. We conclude by monetizing the subjective well-being loss and calculating the extent to which insurance spending can compensate for it. The monetary value of subjective well-being buffered through insurance spending is approximately 33,128 USD for happiness, 33,287 USD for life satisfaction, and 19,597 USD for subjective health for a person in one year. Therefore, we confirm that life/health insurance serves as an ideal option for disaster adaptation. Our findings indicate the importance of considering subjective well-being, which is often neglected when assessing disaster losses

教員養成課程における大学生のICT教育に対する意識── 共同教育学部「ICT教育の授業設計I」初年度を実施してみて ──

This paper described about the class contents and studied the final assignment and the feedback questionnaire result of “Lesson development using ICT I.” The students had not known the detail of policies and specific actions of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. On the other hand, they had strong awareness of the necessity of the utilizing ICT in the school

Following the Birth of a Nanoplasma Produced by an Ultrashort Hard-X-Ray Laser in Xenon Clusters

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) made available a new regime of x-ray intensities, revolutionizing the ultrafast structure determination and laying the foundations of the novel field of nonlinear x-ray optics. Although earlier studies revealed nanoplasma formation when an XFEL pulse interacts with any nanometer-scale matter, the formation process itself has never been decrypted and its timescale was unknown. Here we show that time-resolved ion yield measurements combined with a near-infrared laser probe reveal a surprisingly ultrafast population (similar to 12 fs), followed by a slower depopulation (similar to 250 fs) of highly excited states of atomic fragments generated in the process of XFEL-induced nanoplasma formation. Inelastic scattering of Auger electrons and interatomic Coulombic decay are suggested as the mechanisms populating and depopulating, respectively, these excited states. The observed response occurs within the typical x-ray pulse durations and affects x-ray scattering, thus providing key information on the foundations of x-ray imaging with XFELs