Springer Transboundary Game of Life: Memoir of Masahiko Aoki

The central part of this book is an English version of the memoir of Masahiko Aoki that was published in Japanese in 2008 (青木昌彦私の履歴書 人生越境ゲーム日本経済新聞出版社). In this memoir, Aoki goes over his life as a young boy immediately after World War II, as an activist who opposed the rearmament of Japan under the US-Japan Security Alliance, as a student of Marxist economics first and then modern mathematical economics, as a graduate student at Minnesota, as a young economist at Stanford, Harvard, and then Kyoto, as a central faculty member to develop comparative institutional analysis at Stanford, and as an institutional builder who established the Stanford Kyoto Center, the Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry, the Virtual Center for Advanced Studies Institution in Tokyo, and the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance in Beijing. Until now the memoir has been available only in Japanese and in Chinese. The English edition will allow more young social scientists to touch the life and the work of Masahiko Aoki and be inspired to make their own versions of the “transboundary game of life.” From the Back Cover The central part of this book is an English version of the memoir of Masahiko Aoki that was published in Japanese in 2008 (青木昌彦私の履歴書 人生越境ゲーム日本経済新聞出版社). In this memoir, Aoki goes over his life as a young boy immediately after World War II, as an activist who opposed the rearmament of Japan under the US-Japan Security Alliance, as a student of Marxist economics first and then modern mathematical economics, as a graduate student at Minnesota, as a young economist at Stanford, Harvard, and then Kyoto, as a central faculty member to develop comparative institutional analysis at Stanford, and as an institutional builder who established the Stanford Kyoto Center, the Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry, the Virtual Center for Advanced Studies Institution in Tokyo, and the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance in Beijing. Until now the memoir has been available only in Japanese and in Chinese. The English edition will allow more young social scientists to touch the life and the work of Masahiko Aoki and be inspired to make their own versions of the “transboundary game of life.” About the Author Masahiko Aoki was the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies in the Department of Economics, and a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Aoki was a theoretical and applied economist with a strong interest in institutional and comparative issues. He specialized in the theory of institutions, corporate architecture and governance, and the Japanese and Chinese economies. His most recent book, Corporations in Evolving Diversity: Cognition, Governance, and Institutions, based on his 2008 Clarendon Lectures, was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. It identifies a variety of corporate architecture as diverse associational cognitive systems, and discusses their implications to corporate governance, as well their modes of interactions with society, polity, and financial markets within a unified game-theoretic perspective. His previous book, Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis, was published in 2001 by MIT Press. This work developed a conceptual and analytical framework for integrating comparative studies of institutions in economics and other social science disciplines using game-theoretic language. Aoki's research has been also published in the leading journals in economics, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Literature, Industrial and Corporate Change, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations.Aoki was the president of the International Economic Association fro