Long ago in Romania a prince dealt fairly with a lying merchant and an honest peasant.

A conceptual and analytical framework for understanding economic institutions and institutional change. Markets are one of the most salient institutions produced by humans, and economists have traditionally analyzed the workings of the market mechanism. Recently, however, economists and others have begun to appreciate the many institution-related events and phenomena that have a significant impact on economic performance. Examples include the demise of the communist states, the emergence of Silicon Valley and e-commerce, the European currency unification, and the East Asian financial crises. In this book Masahiko Aoki uses modern game theory to develop a conceptual and analytical framework for understanding issues related to economic institutions. The wide-ranging discussion considers how institutions evolve, why their overall arrangements are robust and diverse across economies, and why they do or do not change in response to environmental factors such as technological progress, global market integration, and demographic change.

In this series of tales, a prince must capture and bring back to his country a zombie who is endowed with magical powers—but in order to succeed he must keep himself from speaking even one word to the zombie. The zombie is wily, and during the long journey he recounts fascinating tales to the prince, who is carrying him in a sack on his back. Spellbound by the stories, the prince is drawn into making some comment on them. But the very moment he opens his mouth, the zombie escapes, and the prince has to go back to India to catch the zombie all over again. This same scenario occurs over and over, tale after tale, journey after journey—until the prince truly learns his lesson. These zombie stories, known as the Vetalapancavimsati in Sanskrit, are engrossing teaching tales that originated in ancient India but have become popular in the Buddhist culture of Tibet, as well as in other Asian cultures. This Tibetan version of the stories conveys the values of Buddhism, particularly those related to karma (the laws of cause and effect), happiness, and suffering. Through these tales, the reader learns that Buddhism is a path of knowledge that leads to liberation from suffering.