In memoriam: Masahiko Aoki (1938–2015)

Professor Masahiko Aoki passed away on July 15, 2015, in a hospital in Stanford, California, USA, from lung disease at the age of 77. This sad news shocked many Japanese economists deeply, as he had been one of the main sources of the innovative directions in economic research in Japan for more than three decades. When we formed the Japan Association for Evolutionary Economics in 1997, he gave us the valuable advice from Stanford to work for the theoretical grounding of the evolutionary paradigm. He joined the editorial board of this journal starting with its first issue (2004).

I first met Prof. Aoki in 1974 when I was a graduate student at Nagoya University, when he was then an associate professor of the Kyoto Institute of Economic Research (KIER). As an invited lecturer in the class of contemporary theoretical economics, he used a selection of representative articles of radical economics he had edited with his own contribution.¹ In the introductory chapter, titled “Political Economy of Welfare: An Essay”, Prof. Aoki set forth his point of view on the development of personalities of individuals and critically sketched the molding of personalities under hierarchical organizations. Referring to John Rawls, he sketched a communicative principle based on the possibility of the exchange of positions. Although he did not live to develop this alternative principle to a full-scale vision of the economy, we can notice that he used the communicative principle often in the setting of his game analysis. I came to know the name of American radical economists such as Stephen Maglin, Herbert Gintis, and Samuel Bowles from this book. I believed that a long-awaited new wind had reached Japan at last.

He seemed to be interested in my previous experience in West Germany at that time and asked me about my research topic. When I completed my master’s degree thesis on property problems in Marx's ‘Capital’ the next year, he invited me to participate in the youth seminar in Kyoto that he organized with his friends. Later he kindly published my article on property problems in the series on economic systems that he edited in 1977.² However, as I devoted my energy to the history of economics after getting a position in this research area in Okayama, my first collaboration with Prof. Aoki ended within a few years.

When I came to Kyoto in 1985, he was affiliated with both Kyoto and Stanford universities. At that time he was constructing the theory of the Japanese firm in collaboration with empirical research on the skill formation system (Kazuo Koike) and the information network that included subcontractors (Banri Asanuma). Grounded on the analysis of incentives and information of the stakeholders of the Japanese firm, he provided the game theoretic model of the Japanese type of firm that is distinguished from the American type. In Prof. Aoki’s Japanese-firm model, managers intervened in the bargain game between employees and stockholders. Prof. Aoki extended his analysis further to the financial structure as well as the politico-administrative structure of Japan.³,⁴ Stimulated by his project, the interest in institutional analysis diffused in Japan without regard to the difference in the mainstream and anti-mainstream. Even in the camp of Marxian economists, Prof. Aoki’s influence was perceived in line with the introduction of the French Regulation approach.

After his final choice to move to Stanford in 1991, I had a rare chance to meet him. At Stanford he polished his methodology into a general approach of the institutional analysis of economic systems, which he called “comparative institutional analysis” (CIA). He published his magnus opus, Towards Comparative Institutional Analysis, in 2001 (MIT Press). In that book Prof. Aoki defined an institution as “a self-sustaining system of shared beliefs about how the game is played” and discussed the formation, development, and change of institutions with the device of the linked game. His wide knowledge of the history of Asian nations as well as of transition economies was skillfully integrated in the book.

Prof. Aoki was an unconquerable organizer of innovative research centers. I have little knowledge on his effort to institutionalize CIA in Stanford and less about his activity as President of the International Economics Association (2008–2011). I know only that he gathered aspiring young researchers around him in the years when he served the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) as its president (2001–2004). In 2007 Prof. Aoki launched the Virtual Center for Advanced Studies in Institutions (VCASI). Responding to his invitation, I joined it as a fellow. At every public meeting of this Center, the seminar room was filled with young researchers. Participating in the lively discussion I was reminded of the meetings in Kyoto 30 years earlier from which I had received the encouragement to proceed into the profession of academic investigation. It was a pity that this institute dissolved in 2011 due to the retreat of the supporting foundation.

I appreciate Masahiko Aoki from the depth of my heart, and I am not the only one to do so.

Kiichiro Yagi

Editor-in-Chief, Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review