This book provides an original analysis of the economic success of Overseas Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia: The ethnically homogeneous group of Chinese middlemen is an informal, low-cost organization for the provision of club goods, e.g. contract enforcement, that are essential to merchants' success. The author's theory - and various extensions, with emphasis on kinship and other trust relationships - draws on economics and the other social sciences, and beyond to evolutionary biology. Empirical material from her fieldwork forms the basis for developing her unique, integrative and transdisciplinary theoretical framework, with important policy implications for understanding ethnic conflict in multiethnic societies where minority groups dominate merchant roles.
About the Author: Landa s research interests: Law-and-economics of informal institutions for promoting exchange; Economics of trust, ethnicity, and identity. See her book:
Janet Tai Landa, " Trust, Ethnicity, and Identity: Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift - Exchange." Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Honors received:
Visiting Professor, East China University of Political Science and Law (Shanghai, China), since October 25, 2010.
Member of Core Advisory Group for biologist David Sloan Wilson s Evolutionary Institute (Binghamton University) & National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) joint project, Integration of Economics with Evolutionary Theory, since August 2010.
Nominator for the Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, since 2000.
Founding Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Bioeconomics [Springer journal], 1999-2009.
Research Associate, Center for the Study of the History & Philosophy of Science, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. Visiting scholar, April 1997.
Peter Klockner Foundation Fellowship, East Asian Studies Institute/China Section, Dept.of Economics, Gerhard-Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany, May 1 - August 30, 1997.
IRIS scholar, Research grant University of Maryland's IRIS Program (Institutional Reform and Informal Sector), sponsored by the U. S. Agency for International Development, June 1, 1992- Dec. 31, 1993.
Research Associate, Center for the Study of Law & Society, University of California, Berkeley, Aug. 1989 - Aug. 1990.
Visiting Scholar, Vincent Ostrom & Elinor Ostrom s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, Sept. 1987 - Dec. 1987.
National Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 1986 - July 30, 1987."
