Measurement of Social Preference from Utility-Based Choice Experiments

Ever since the classical works of Smith and Veblen, economists have recognized that individuals care about their relative positions and status in addition to their own consumption. This paper addresses a new framework of choice experiments in order to specify the shape of utility function with preference externalities. Theoretical studies on social preference, which are conducted without estimating or calibrating important parameters of social preference and put forward various propositions in accordance with the parameters assumed, can refer to the parameters estimated in this paper. Our findings complement those of happiness studies which support the view of social preference. We show that preference externality is, on average, characterized by jealousy among Japanese respondents, and also that heterogeneity in social preference parameters is driven by differences in income levels, age, and gender.

Detecting partial synchrony in a complex oscillatory network using pseudo-vortices

Partial synchronization is characteristic phase dynamics of coupled oscillators on various natural and artificial networks, which can remain undetected due to the complexity of the systems. With an analogy between pairwise asynchrony of oscillators and topological defects, i.e., vortices, in the two-dimensional XY spin model, we propose a robust and data-driven method to identify the partial synchronization on complex networks. The proposed method is based on an integer matrix whose element is pseudo-vorticity that discretely quantifies asynchronous phase dynamics in every two oscillators, which results in graphical and entropic representations of partial synchrony. As a first trial, we apply our method to 200 FitzHugh-Nagumo neurons on a complex small-world network. Partially synchronized chimera states are revealed by discriminating synchronized states even with phase lags. Such phase lags also appear in partial synchronization in chimera states. Our topological, graphical, and entropic method is implemented solely with measurable phase dynamics data, which will lead to a straightforward application to general oscillatory networks including neural networks in the brain.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Construction of families of dihedral quintic polynomials

In this article, we give two families of dihedral quintic polynomials by using the Weber sextic resolvent and a certain elliptic curve