Evolutionary arguments are often used to justify the fundamental behavioral postulates of competive equilibrium. Economists such as Milton Friedman have argued that natural selection favors profit maximizing firms over firms engaging in other behaviors. Consequently, producer efficiency, and...

Since the classic work of Feyerabend and Kuhn, the role of social factors in the scientific enterprise has been a major concern in the philosophy and history of science. In particular, the presence of social factors such as the desire for prestige or pressures to conform to accepted ideas, have...

This paper describes a range of methods which have been proposed to study interactions in economic and social contexts. By interactionsk, we refer to interdependences between individual decisions which are not mediated by markets. These types of models have been employed to understand phenonmena...

This paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioral outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behavior of others in an...

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in issues of inequality by the economics profession. The sources of this increased interest are straightforward to discern. First, both increasing cross-section wage inequality as well as the apparent intractability of inner city poverty have...

We provide an overview of recent empirical research on patterns of cross-country growth. The new empirical regularities considered differ from earlier ones, e.g., the well-known Kaldor stylized facts. The new research no longer makes production function accounting a central part of the analysis....

This paper explores the evolution of the cross-section income distribution in economies where endogenous neighborhood formation interacts with positive within-neighborhood feedback effects. We study an economy in which the economic success of adults is determined by the characteristics of the...

This paper provides a unified framework for interpreting a wide range of interactions models which have appeared in the economics literature. A formalization taken from the statistical mechanics literature is shown to encompass a number of socioeconomic phenomena ranging from out of wedlock...

A recent spate of writings has argued that in a fundamental sense, science is reaching limits. The basic claims of this work is twofold. First, it is argued that for many areas of inquiry, notably physics, chemistry, and biology, science has provided an essentially accurate view of nature. The...