Masahiko Aoki (April 1, 1938 – July 15, 2015) was a Japanese economist, Tomoye and Henri Takahashi Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies in the Economics Department, and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
In order to focus on research and take a greater role in international activities,[4] he became Professor Emeritus of Stanford University in 2004.
[12][13] Aoki's major academic contributions to economics and the social sciences in general were in the fields of the comparative institutional analysis, the theory of the firm, and corporate governance.
[14][15] Together with Paul Milgrom, Avner Greif, Yingyi Qian, and Marcel Fafchamp, he created a comparative institutional field in the economics department at Stanford in the early 1990s.
From this perspective he laid analytical foundations for basic concepts in institutional analysis such as institutional complementarities, social embedeness (linked games), and public representations mediating the salient features of the state of play and individual beliefs, and applied them to comparative analysis across countries and regions.
[23][24] Aoki's interests then moved into comparisons of various internal information structures of the firm (hierarchical, horizontal and modular), and its applications to international varieties of corporate firms across Anglo-American, Japanese, German, Silicon Valley, and Chinese systems, as well as to a comparative assessment of nuclear power disasters (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima).
A Memorial Conference celebrating his life and work was held at Stanford University on December 4, 2015 and included addresses by Kenneth Arrow, Francis Fukuyama, Koichi Hamada, and Dale Jorgenson.