15 pages

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

Evolution is thought to occur in many disciplinary domains. Because of the intellectual attraction of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, evolutionary processes in other domains are often conceptualized in terms of that theory. However, as explained, such a heuristic strategy is neither...

How relevant is the notion of evolution for economics? In view of the paradigmatic influence of Darwinian thought, several recently advocated interpretations are discussed first which rely on Darwinian concepts. As an alternative, a notion of evolution is suggested that is based on a few,...

It is argued that the ‘routines as genes’ analogy is misleading in several respects. Neither genes nor routines program behaviour, if this is taken to involve, first, that they determine behaviour and, second, that they do so in a way that excludes conscious, deliberate choice. On a proper...

We introduce a new kind of projection dynamics by employing a ray-projection both locally and globally. By global (local) we mean a projection of a vector (close to the unit simplex) unto the unit simplex along a ray through the origin. Using a correspondence between local and global...

The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, 'creative destruction’ leads to economic development 'from within’...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of cultural evolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how the biased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influences agents’...

Currently there is an ongoing discussion about how Darwinian concepts should be harnessed to further develop economic theory. Two approaches to this question, Universal Darwinism and the continuity hypothesis, are presented in this paper. It is shown whether abstract principles can be derived...

We present two new notions of evolutionary stability, the truly evolutionarily stable state (TESS) and the generalized evolutionarily stable equilibrium (GESE). The GESE generalizes the evolutionarily stable equilibrium (ESE) of Joosten [1996]. An ESE attracts all nearby trajectories...