The Association Between Perceived Income Inequality and Subjective Well-being: Evidence from a Social Survey in Japan

Previous studies have shown that income inequality in society is negatively associated with individuals subjective well-being (SWB), such as their perceived happiness and self-rated health (SRH). However, it is not realistic to assume that individuals have precise information about actual income distribution measured by the Gini coefficient or other statistical measures. In the current study, we examined how perceived income inequality, rather than actual inequality, was associated with SWB, using cross-sectional data collected from a nationwide, Internet survey conducted in Japan (N = 10,432). We also examined how this association was confounded by individuals’ objective and subjective income status, considering the possibility that individuals with lower income status are more inclined to both perceive income inequality and feel unhappy/unhealthy. In our analysis, we focused on the perception of widening income inequality (as perceived income inequality), perceived happiness and SRH (as SWB), and household income and living standards compared with 1 year ago and compared with others (as income status). We also controlled for personality traits. We obtained three key findings: (1) perceived income inequality was negatively associated with SWB; (2) both perceived income inequality and SWB were associated with income status; and (3) the association between perceived income inequality and SWB was attenuated after controlling for income status, but not fully for perceived happiness. These findings suggest that perceived income inequality, which links actual income inequality to SWB, should be further studied.     

Expanding state space and extension of beliefs

This article provides a simple decision theoretic model in which elements of the world successively enter the decision maker??s scope and the state space expands over time, which is intended to be the closest correspondence to the standard subjective expected utility theory. We propose a dynamic consistency condition that after any expansion of the scope, the preference ranking should remain unchanged over acts to which the expansion is irrelevant. Together with other natural axioms, it characterizes a model in which the decision maker??s belief extends over time in order that the marginal distribution of the new belief induced over the old state space coincides with the old belief. It is extended to encompass both expansion of scope and learning events, and we characterize the model with an additional property that the decision maker??s belief updating follows Bayes?? rule when she learns events.     

Matrix decomposition in meta-analysis for extraction of adverse event pattern and patient-level safety profile

The purpose of assessing adverse events (AEs) in clinical studies is to evaluate what AE patterns are likely to occur during treatment. In contrast, it is difficult to specify which of these patterns occurs in each patient. To tackle this challenging issue, we constructed a new statistical model including nonnegative matrix factorization by incorporating background knowledge of AE-specific structures such as severity and drug mechanism of action. The model uses a meta-analysis framework for integrating data from multiple clinical studies because insufficient information is derived from a single trial. We demonstrated the proposed method by applying it to real data consisting of three Phase III studies, two mechanisms of action, five anticancer treatments, 3317 patients, 848 AE types, and 99,546 AEs. The extracted typical treatment-specific AE patterns coincided with medical knowledge. We also demonstrated patient-level safety profiles using the data of AEs that were observed by the end of the second cycle.     

Conditional Inclusion: Sexual Minorities,Tolerance, and Nationalism

This article discusses how the approach towards sexual minorities has shifted from exclusion to inclusion between the mid-1980s and the present, and explores how the view that Japan is more tolerant of sexual minorities than the USA and Europe actually limits discussions on citizenship. An examination of the AIDS crisis and the Fuchu Youth Center court case in the 1980s and 1990s shows that gay men were regarded as a threat to national identity, seen to endanger Japan and whose sexuality was deemed to be unintelligible. In a word, their citizenship was denied. In the 2010s the ruling Liberal Democratic party issued a report on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues, which examined measures aimed at achieving equality for those who suffer from SOGI discrimination. While sexual minorities became an object of inclusion, only partial and circumscribed citizenship was granted. Although the report ostensibly aims to promote SOGI diversity, it relegates the existence of minorities to the private sphere, and limits diversity by demanding the acceptance of a “tolerant culture” predicated on heterosexism and gender norms. By positioning their diversity effort in Japan's “tolerant traditional culture,” the party inadvertently incorporates nationalism and renders it central to their approach towards SOGI diversity. This article concludes that the discourse that the Japanese state is tolerant of sexual minorities undermines the recognition of sexual minorities’ citizenship.     

Context dependence and consistency in dynamic choice under uncertainty: the case of anticipated regret

We examine if and to what extent choice dispositions can allow dependence on contexts and maintain consistency over time, in a dynamic environment under uncertainty. We focus on one of the context dependence properties, opportunity dependence because of being affected by anticipated regret, where the consequentialist choice framework is maintained. There are two sources of potential inconsistency: one is arrival of information, and the other is changing opportunities. First, we go over the general method of resolution of potential inconsistency, by taking any kinds of inconsistency as given constraints. Second, we characterize a class of choice dispositions that are consistent to information arrival, but may be inconsistent to changing opportunities. Finally, we consider the overall requirement of dynamic consistency and show that it necessarily implies each of consistency to information arrival and independence of choice opportunities. The last result states that the two kinds of potential inconsistency cannot “compensate” each other to recover dynamic consistency overall.     

On the distributions of multivariate sample skewness

In this paper, we consider the multivariate normality test based on measure of multivariate sample skewness defined by Srivastava (1984). Srivastava derived asymptotic expectation up to the order N⁻¹ for the multivariate sample skewness and approximate χ²${\chi }^2$ test statistic, where N   is sample size. Under normality, we derive another expectation and variance for Srivastava's multivariate sample skewness in order to obtain a better test statistic. From this result, improved approximate χ²${\chi }^2$ test statistic using the multivariate sample skewness is also given for assessing multivariate normality. Finally, the numerical result by Monte Carlo simulation is shown in order to evaluate accuracy of the obtained expectation, variance and improved approximate χ²${\chi }^2$ test statistic. Furthermore, upper and lower percentiles of χ²${\chi }^2$ test statistic derived in this paper are compared with those of χ²${\chi }^2$ test statistic derived by Mardia (1974) which is used multivariate sample skewness defined by Mardia (1970).     

A pragmatic dose‐finding approach using short‐term surrogate efficacy outcomes to evaluate binary efficacy and toxicity outcomes in phase I cancer clinical trials

There is a growing need for study designs that can evaluate efficacy and toxicity outcomes simultaneously in phase I or phase I/II cancer clinical trials. Many dose‐finding approaches have been proposed; however, most of these approaches assume binary efficacy and toxicity outcomes, such as dose‐limiting toxicity (DLT), and objective responses. DLTs are often defined for short time periods. In contrast, objective responses are often defined for longer periods because of practical limitations on confirmation and the criteria used to define ‘confirmation’. This means that studies have to be carried out for unacceptably long periods of time. Previous studies have not proposed a satisfactory solution to this specific problem. Furthermore, this problem may be a barrier for practitioners who want to implement notable previous dose‐finding approaches. To cope with this problem, we propose an approach using unconfirmed early responses as the surrogate efficacy outcome for the confirmed outcome. Because it is reasonable to expect moderate positive correlation between the two outcomes and the method replaces the surrogate outcome with the confirmed outcome once it becomes available, the proposed approach can reduce irrelevant dose selection and accumulation of bias. Moreover, it is also expected that it can significantly shorten study duration. Using simulation studies, we demonstrate the positive utility of the proposed approach and provide three variations of it, all of which can be easily implemented with modified likelihood functions and outcome variable definitions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Augmenting a Submodular and Posi-modular Set Function by a Multigraph

Given a finite set V and a set function , we consider the problem of constructing an undirected multigraph G = (V,E) such that the cut function together has value at least 2 for all non-empty and proper subsets of V. If f is intersecting submodular and posi-modular, and satisfies the tripartite inequality, then we show that such a multigraph G with the minimum number of edges can be found in time, where is the time to compute the value of f(X) for a subset .     

Estimating the Lyapunov exponent from chaotic time series with dynamic noise

In this paper, we propose an estimator of the Lyapunov exponent of the skeleton for chaotic time series with dynamic noise and prove the consistency of the estimator under some assumptions.     

A one-sample location test based on weighted averaging of two test statistics when the dimension and the sample size are large

We discuss a one-sample location test that can be used when the dimension and the sample size are large. It is well-known that the power of Hotelling’s test decreases when the dimension is close to the sample size. To address this loss of power, some non exact approaches were proposed, e.g., Dempster (1958 Dempster, A.P. (1958). A high dimensional two sample significance test. Ann. Math. Stat. 29:995–1010.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 1960 Dempster, A.P. (1960). A significance test for the separation of two highly multivariate small samples. Biometrics 16:41–50.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Bai and Saranadasa (1996 Bai, Z.D., Saranadasa, H. (1996). Effect of high dimension: by an example of a two sample problem. Stat. Sin. 6:311–329.[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Srivastava and Du (2008 Srivastava, M.S., Du, M. (2008). A test for the mean vector with fewer observations than the dimension. J. Multivariate Anal. 99:386–402.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In this article, we focus on Hotelling’s test and Dempster’s test. The comparative merits and demerits of these two tests vary according to the local parameters. In particular, we consider the situation where it is difficult to determine which test should be used, that is, where the two tests are asymptotically equivalent in terms of local power. We propose a new statistic based on the weighted averaging of Hotelling’s T²-statistic and Dempster’s statistic that can be applied in such a situation. Our weight is determined on the basis of the maximum local asymptotic power on a restricted parameter space that induces local asymptotic equivalence between Hotelling’s test and Dempster’s test. Numerical results show that our test is more stable than Hotelling’s T²-statistic and Dempster’s statistic in most parameter settings.