The purpose of this paper is to show how institutional and evolutionary economics provide better insights as to whysome firms survive and others do not than does neoclassical economics. At the heart of the evolutionary theory isthe view that new firms are a manifestation of diversity and that...

Repeated games tend to have large sets of equilibria. We also know that in the repeated prisoners dilemma there is a profusion of neutrally stable strategies, but no strategy that is evolutionarily stable. This paper shows that for all of these neutrally stable strategies there is a stepping...

We apply the dynamic stochastic framework proposed by recent evolutionaryliterature to the class of strict supermodular games when two simplebehavior rules coexist in the population, imitation and myopic optimization.We assume that myopic optimizers are able to see how well their payoff...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means ofdirect coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices suchas contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In alocal interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with sufficient...

The advantages and disadvantages of genetic modification of organisms in agriculture are reviewed. These relate to the environment, human health, socio-economic effects, population growth, and differential consequences for developed and developing countries. An overall evaluation requires that...

The likelihood of cancer emergence is highly dependent on the underlying tissue structure. This article gives evolutionary explanations for why natural selection fails to select for tissue structures that would minimize the likelihood of cancer. In a second step, a mathematical framework is...

This paper proposes and applies a formal theoretical model of an automatic (prosocial and antisocial) caring mechanism: the informational affective tie mechanism (iATM) model. Novel in the formalization is the factoring in of information extraction concerning the behavioral type of agents...