Masahiko Aoki is the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies in the Economics Department, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. His preferred field covers the theory of institution, corporate governance, East Asian economies.

Aoki's 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 architcture as discrete systems of associational-cognition, and discusses their implications to corpoprate governance, as well as their institutionalized 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 comparative studies of institutions using game-theoretic language. His 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, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations.

Aoki was a President of the International Economic Association (2008~2011) as well as a President of the Japanese Economic Association (1995-96). He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the founding editor of the Journal of Japanese and International Economies. He was awarded the Japan Academy Prize in 1990, and the 6th International Schumpeter Prize in 1998. Between 2001 and 2004, Aoki served as the President and Chief Research Officer (CRO) of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in Japan .

Aoki graduated from the University of Tokyo with a BA and an MA in economics and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1967. He was formerly an assistant professor at Stanford University and Harvard University and served as both an associate and full professor at the University of Kyoto before re-joining the Stanford faculty in 1984.� He has also visited institutions in China, England, Germany, Japan and Sweden. He became Professor Emeritus in 2005 to concentrate on research as well as be engaged in various international activities.

Recent articles:

The Five Phases of Economic Development and Institutional Evolution in China and Japan, Presidential Lecture at the XVI-th World Congress of the International Economic Association, July 4th, 2011.

Organizations Under Large Uncertainty: An Analysis of the Fukushima Catastrophe, jointly with Geoffrey Rothwell