The two-year Master's Program in Economic Development (MPED) is a full-time, English-based graduate course offered by Ritsumeikan University’s Graduate School of Economics.

Established in 2002, the program is conducted by faculty members with an exceptional range of specialist research interests and a wealth of overseas experience.

RESEARCH
Specialist Areas: Political Economy, Experimental Economics, Economic Philosophy, and Institutional Economics: I really love philosophy. As a PhD student I studied the philosophy of economics, and wrote extensively on it. My PhD thesis was also about the philosophy of economics. I found it fascinating, and still do, but my supervisor reminded me that, though philosophy can be interesting and a good influence to think on a deeper level, you also have to think about how the philosophy that emerges from this thinking – your philosophy - connects to real, practical economics. Hence my work more recently has focused on experimental economics.

Postgrad: ‘A history of the epistemology of the Austrian School as an attempt to solve the demarcation problem in the social sciences’ was the title of my PhD dissertation. At the time, in addition to philosophy as I have already mentioned, I was also interested in the Austrian School of Economics. It just so happened that my supervisor had a friend who was a professor at Vienna University, and so I was fortunate enough to be able to spend time in both Japan and Austria, with two supervisors - one in Kyoto and the other in Vienna.

My research considered the question: ‘What does human behavior mean in economics?’ However, because behavioral economics was, unlike now, relatively unpopular then, my approach focused on considerations of the radical history of economic thought. In questioning established ideas, the Austrian School is quite interesting because it offers alternatives to the major theories of economics, which tend to be based on the presuppositions that market processes take precedence and humans are completely rational.

Though I agree with considering humans as rational decision makers, I suspect decision making is affected by other motivations too - social norms and morals, and feelings of care towards others, for example. Taking these into account is important in order to truly understand the reality of economics. Hence, in attempting to radically reconstruct some economic ideas, I turned to the ideas of a radical school, the Austrian School, and, for balance and good measure, the philosophy of science.

Current: Following on from my PhD research, I began to focus on experimental and behavioral economics, eventually incorporating laboratory experiments into my activities. Hence, in my current work, both theory and experiment come together. I am examining the theory that workers are motivated in their decision-making by factors such as how they can contribute to an organization of which they are a part, for example, and not just factors such as selfishness or fair treatment.

The experimental side of my research takes place in the laboratory we have here on campus. It consists of a set of 20 or more computers separated from each other, and much of the content itself takes the form of asking subjects to play specially designed games based on social situations, which often have a financial incentive attached to them related to final scores, and so on. We examine the interplay between the motivation of subjects, decision-making and finance. The results so far have been very revealing.

Of course, in most cases subjects are motivated by financial incentives; but we have found that non-financial factors are extremely important in many cases too.