Works
- Horizontal vs. vertical information structure of the firm, American Economic Review 76(5), 971 to 983, 1986
- Information, Incentives, and Bargaining in the Japanese Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988
- Toward an economic model of the Japanese firm, Journal of Economic Literature 28(1), 1 to 27, 1990
- Corporations in Evolving Diversity: Cognition, Governance, and Institutions, Oxford University Press, Oxford (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies), 2010
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The J-firm
Ideas
Horizontal information structure. Aoki compared the efficiency of a hierarchical and a horizontal information structure for coordinating interrelated shops whose costs are uncertain, after contrasting Japanese and American practice. Caveat: A formal model. Its abstract, the part read, does not say which structure is more efficient or under what conditions.
The ranking hierarchy as incentive scheme. In the J-firm the rank hierarchy motivates the skills and cooperation the horizontal structure needs. Caveat: Describes large Japanese firms of the 1980s.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.