Janet Tai Landa
Janet Tai Landa's researches aims to evolve around the core question: How does specific identity of buyers and sellers are related to transactions in economics.As early as 1978, Janet Tai Landa published her thesis, The economics of the ethnically homogeneous middleman group: A property rights-public choice approach , at the Polytechnic University of Virginia, in which she had integrated the following factors: identity, trust, clan, religion, and symbols.In her 1999 article, Janet Tai Landa draws on some of the key concepts of the new institutional economy, as well as the modern literature of evolutionary biology.Her article presents an economic theory of Chinese merchants, which suggests that the Confucian code of ethics emphasizes the importance of mutual help, reciprocal help between parents, colleagues and villagers speaking the same dialect.This allowed the formation of “club-like” organizational arrangements consisting of homogeneous members of merchants providing themselves with infrastructure essential or profit-making entrepreneurship.Thus the Chinese club-integrated merchants were able to benefit from lower transaction cost, which gave them a significant differential advantage in competing with other market-oriented ethnic groups.[4] In short, it turns out that the theory that Janet Tai Landa abstracted from the business gang 40 years ago is surprisingly forward-looking — the analysis of trust, reputation and business groups is quite similar to Greif's series of classic studies;[5] Analyzing the optimal size and entry threshold using religious, and it is also very consistent with Iannaccone's classic analysis of religion in 1992.Specifically, this book considers the coordinating role of three major nonprice institutions—ethnic trading networks, contract law, and gift-exchange—in economizing on transaction costs and thus facilitating the process of exchange in decentralized economies in different historical contexts.Landa's theory - and the various extensions that emphasize kinship and other trust relationships - draw on economics and other social sciences and go beyond evolutionary biology.Her empirical material forms the basis for the development of her unique, integrated and interdisciplinary theoretical framework and has important policy implications for understanding ethnic conflicts in multi-ethnic societies where minority groups dominate the role of merchants.It shows how division of labor within ethnic communities, social capital based on trust relationships, a deeply embedded code of ethics, the potential for monitoring and sanctioning dishonesty, and ways to internally generate mutual trust, the foundation of social capital, can explain the success of ethnic middleman entrepreneurs.--Ronald CoaseFather: Tai Huai Ching was a news reporter at Singapore Sin Chew Daily, a photographer, and a Canadian Chinese transliteration.