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Article History

Received: 31 March 2026

Accepted: 10 August 2026

First Online: 14 August 2026

Declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate: This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University (Approval No. R21014; approved on October 14, 2020). The research project was entitled “Economic research on preventive behavior against new coronavirus infections,” and was conducted under the supervision of the principal investigator, Professor Fumio Ohtake. All procedures involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the Ethical Guidelines for Medical and Health Research Involving Human Subjects enforced by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants prior to their participation in the survey. As all participants involved in this study were aged 18 years or older, informed consent from parents or legal guardians was not required.

Consent for publication: Not applicable (the manuscript does not contain individually identifiable participant data).

Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all participants at the time of the survey, in accordance with the standard procedures for online surveys administered by INTAGE Inc. After the surveys, the research team submitted the project to the Ethics Committee of the Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University. The Committee reviewed the design, the consent procedures, and the data-handling protocol of the completed surveys, and granted approval on October 14, 2020. No additional data collection was conducted after the approval date.

AI usage disclosure: During the preparation of this manuscript, the authors used AI-assisted technologies (Gemini, Google) to refine the English language and stylistic expression. In response to a reviewer’s comment, the authors carefully re-examined the manuscript to ensure that the AI-assisted editing did not introduce conceptual claims or mechanisms that are not supported by the study variables. As a result of this re-examination, terms that went beyond what the data can directly support were removed or rephrased as tentative interpretations. The authors reviewed and edited all generated content and take full responsibility for the final content of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.