Psychometric validation of anti-clot treatment scale and treatment satisfaction questionnaire for medication version II in Japanese patients with atrial fibrillation

Aims: The Anti-Clot Treatment Scale (ACTS) and Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire for Medication version II (TSQM-II) are validated treatment satisfaction patient-reported outcome (PRO) instruments. The ACTS includes two domains: Burdens and Benefits; the TSQM-II includes four: Effectiveness, Side Effects, Convenience, and Global Satisfaction. Japanese-language versions of the ACTS and TSQM-II have been developed and linguistically validated. This study aimed to assess their psychometric properties in Japanese patients with atrial fibrillation (AF).

Materials and methods: ACTS and TSQM-II data from 534 patients with AF were collected in a Japanese post-marketing surveillance study of a direct oral-anticoagulant, rivaroxaban. Four key psychometric properties, in line with best practice guidelines from the US Food and Drug Administration, were examined using traditional psychometric methods: acceptability, scaling assumptions, reliability (i.e. internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability), and construct validity (i.e. convergent validity and known groups).

Results: ACTS Burdens and Benefits and TSQM-II Effectiveness, Convenience, and Global Satisfaction scales were found to be acceptable (e.g. item-level missing data at baseline <4%), with all scales having good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.80). test-retest reproducibility intraclass correlation coefficients for the ACTS Burdens and Benefits were 0.59 and 0.65, respectively, and between 0.54–0.61 for the TSQM-II scales. Known-groups validity for the ACTS and TSQM-II was supported by differences in scale scores by positive and negative impact (p?<?0.05). Correlations between the ACTS and TSQM-II (convergent validity) were lower than expected (range r?=?0.09–0.48), but in line with the original ACTS development study.

Limitations: Evaluation of test-retest reproducibility was limited by assessment period, which was longer (3 months) than recommended guidelines (usually up to 2 weeks).

Conclusions: Overall, Japanese versions of ACTS and TSQM-II scales satisfied internal consistency reliability and traditional validity criteria. Our study supports the ACTS and TSQM-II as appropriate PRO instruments to measure satisfaction with anticoagulant treatment in Japanese patients with AF.

Trial registration: NCT01598051, clinicaltrials.gov; registered April 20, 2012.     

白领阶层的职务意识及其决定的主要原因

本文的主要目的是研究和阐明20世纪90年代后期中国工业企业中白领阶层的地位和特点。文中的数据来自于我们在武汉市所作的问卷调查以及由此所进行的统计判别分析。通过分析我们指出:尽管白领阶层的工资收入与普通工人没有什么差别,但他们的职务意识,特别是他们在对待市场化等问题的态度上更接近于管理人员。这种状况被认为主要是源于白领所拥有的较高的文化程度。这些分析结果意味着职务意识可能与工资等劳动条件没有太大关联。     

Rights and judicial independence

This paper models endogenous judicial independence (JI) as a commitment device in a political commitment game between a ruler and citizens. In a situation where citizens can observe the effectiveness of JI with some positive probability, the model shows that the ruler in fact creates an independent judiciary and credibly commits to an announced tax rate, i.e., the ruler protects private property rights. Even when citizens have no chance to observe the effectiveness of JI, the ruler can still guarantee property rights by granting human rights as a signal of JI. Although the creation of JI achieves a Pareto improvement compared with its lack, two sources of inefficiency arise. First, the equilibrium tax is inefficiently high in the sense that the tax rate is on the inefficient side of the Laffer curve. This inefficiently high tax reflects the cost of credible commitment. Second, equilibrium JI for guaranteeing human rights is inefficiently high in the sense that the ruler does not entirely use JI for credibly committing to a low tax. This inefficiently high JI represents the cost of credible signalling.     

Mining History of Gamification Towards Finding Expertise in Question and Answering Communities: Experience and Practice with Stack Exchange

Recently, an online Q&A tool has become an essential part of individual communities and organizations of experts on specific topics. Using the answers to questions about specific topics will help such communities work more efficiently in their fields. Currently, Q&A online communities are adopting gamification to engage users by granting awards to successful users. In this paper, we investigate how to mine award achievement histories to find expertise. We propose the use of sequence analysis and clustering techniques. Specifically, we study the history of Stack Exchange, a large Q&A community that employs gamification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of using award achievement history to find expertise in Q&A communities.     

The optimal exchange rate regime for a small country

This paper examines the welfare comparisons between a freely floating, a managed floating, and a pegged exchange rate regime. We compare the expected loss under these regimes by modifying and generalizing Hamada’s (2002) model to accommodate intervention policy. We consider the de jure and de facto classifications, where the former is defined by the officially stated intentions of the monetary authorities, while the latter is based on the actually observed behavior of the nominal exchange rate. We first examine the exchange rate regimes from the central bank’s policy stance and the actual exchange rate policy. Next we assume that the regime which the private sector perceives according to an official announcement may be different from the one adopted actually by the central bank. We examine nine combinations of the de jure and de facto regimes. We interpret that, whenever they are different, there is informational friction between the central bank and the private sector. We show that the welfare level of a small country under freely floating is no less than that under other regimes, and that with some restrictive conditions, the de facto pegged or de facto managed floating is close to freely floating. This partly explains “Fear of floating” and “Fear of pegging”.     

Contributing for Myself,but Free riding for My Group?

Many real‐world decisions are made by individuals as representatives of groups. Most research, however, studies either individuals or groups as decision‐makers. This paper explores whether there is a general difference between a decision made as an individual and as a representative of a group in the context of a public good game. We conducted a series of experiments to test this question and to understand mechanisms contributing to potential differences. We found that representatives contributed less than individuals when they could not communicate with their constituency. However, when they could discuss their strategy before playing, they contributed at least as much as individual decision‐makers. Furthermore, when they could justify their decision after playing, they contributed even more than individual decision‐makers. We discuss potential reasons for this and directions for future research.     

Farewell to the salaryman? The changing roles and work of middle managers in Japan

The 1990s and 2000s witnessed significant organizational change in Japanese firms and accompanying readjustments to the employment system. Such changes potentially have major implications for middle managers, or salarymen, in Japanese corporations. A survey of human resource managers and middle managers in eight medium sized Japanese organizations pointed to fairly significant, if not radical, change. This did, indeed, impact upon middle managers in those organizations. While the middle managers felt reasonably secure in their jobs, the nature of their jobs had reportedly changed, with a greater range of tasks, work intensification, longer hours, greater stress, more accountability, and a worsening work–life balance.     

Complementarity,fiscal decentralization and economic growth

Theories of the voluntary provision of public goods and development economics have clarified that complementarity in the production process is a crucial ingredient to understanding how alternative economic environments affect economic performance. This paper examines how the structures of intra- and inter-regional complementarity affect the relationship between economic growth and fiscal decentralization. We provide a theory that describes how fiscal decentralization affects economic growth under various structures of regional complementarity. Our empirical analysis, based on a panel data set of the fifty states of the United States over the period of 1992–1997, supports our theoretical specification of the production function. Also, we observe a hump-shaped relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth that is consistent with our theoretical result. Our analysis also shows that the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization conducive to economic growth is higher than the average of the data in some cases, and hence further decentralization is recommended for economic growth. The previous version of the paper was presented at the 59th Congress of the International Institute of Public Finance (University of Economics in Prague, Prague), the 2003 Fall Meeting of the Japanese Economic Association (Meiji University, Tokyo), the 60th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Institute of Public Finance (Kansai University, Osaka), and in seminars at Yokohama National University and the University of California, Irvine. The authors acknowledge the comments and discussions by people including Timothy Goodspeed, Kiyoshi Mitsui, Motohiro Sato, Etsuro Shioji, Tsunao Okumura, and Craig Parsons. We are also grateful for the comments by the Editor (Amihai Glazer) and two anonymous referees. The usual disclaimer applies. Nishimura acknowledges the financial support from JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Postdoctoral Fellowships for Research Abroad.     

Parallel Consultant-Guided Search with Crossover

Consultant-guided search (CGS) is a recent metaheuristic method. This approach is an algorithm in which a virtual person called a client creates a solution based on consultation with a virtual person called a consultant. In this study, we propose a parallel CGS algorithm with a genetic algorithm’s crossover and selection, and calculate an approximation solution for the traveling salesman problem. We execute a computer experiment using the benchmark problems (TSPLIB). Our algorithm provides a solution with less than 3.3% error rate for problem instances using less than 6000 cities.