This volume collects 22 articles by Masahiko Aoki, selected from writings published over the course of his 45-year academic career. These fascinating essays cover a range of issues, including mechanism design, comparative governance, corporate governance, institutions and institutional change,...

Based on the variable rate of gross domestic product per capita growth and its sources, this paper first identifies five phases of economic development that are common to China, Japan, and Korea : M (Malthusian), G (government-led), K (à la Kuznets), H (human capital based) and PD (post...

This paper analyzes the impacts of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which were amplified by a failure of coordination across the plant, corporate, industrial, and regulatory levels, resulting in a nuclear catastrophe, comparable in...

This paper proposes an approach to the roles of social norm dealing with economic externalities. Traditionally social norms are treated by economists as external constraints or endogenous outcomes of repeated economic transactions. In contrast, this paper formulates a game of social exchanges...

This paper begins with contested issues among various approaches to institutions and seeks an analytical/conceptual framework for integrating them. Based on fundamental studies of knowledge theory and epistemic game theory, it discusses the role of institutions in substantive forms as societal...

This essay makes a conceptual distinction between societal categories, such as social networks, norms, and social status differentiation, on the one hand, and social capital, on the other. The former are institutional phenomena arising as outcomes of social-exchange games in which individual...

This article proposes a simple framework for understanding an emergent diversity of linkages between corporate governance (CG) and organizational architecture (OA). It distinguishes discreet modes of their linkage by different combinatorial patterns between three basic assets: managers' human...

This essay provides a game-theoretic, endogenous view of institutions, and then applies the idea to identify the sources of institutional trajectories of economic development in China, Japan, and Korea. It stylizes the Malthusian-phase of East Asian economies as peasant-based economies in which...

This article proposes a simple framework for understanding diversity of linkages between corporate governance (CG) and organizational architecture (OA). It distinguishes discreet modes of their linkage by different combinatorial patterns between three basic assets: managers’ human assets...