China’s reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has achieved notably through 30 years of reforms while the performance of SOEs is still low. Basing on a summing-up of reforms of SOEs the paper gives an evaluation of economic theories affecting China’s reform of SOEs. Focuses in different...

Institutions are the equilibrium states of games, and the emergence of institutions is an evolutionary, stochastic, and (social) structural dependence process of interactions among agents. In this paper, we address the relationship between the institutional emergence and the structure of social...

Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners´ dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust...

We investigate aspects of institutional change in an evolutionary game-theoretic framework, in principle focusing on problems of coordination in groups when new solutions to a problem become available. In an evolutionary game with an underlying dilemma structure, we let a number of new...

Growth is often treated as something like a general property of any well-managed economic system, but the sustainability of this has been called into question since the 1970s. The current paper argues that the main problem with growth statistics - measured in income or capital - lies in the way...

Classical economists from Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus and to Karl Marx have considered the importance of <i>direct interdependence</i> and direct interactions for the economy. This was even more the case for original institutionalist thinkers such as Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and Clarence Ayres....

This paper deals with institutional emergence in the well-known 'evolution of cooperation' framework and focuses on its size dimension. It is argued that some 'meso' (rather than 'macro') level (to be numerically determined) is the proper level of cultural emergence, diffusion, and retention....