The nature of economic opportunity has recently received significant attention in entrepreneurship, organization science and strategy. The notion of boundedly rational search on an (NK) opportunity landscape has been particularly relevant to these conversations and debates. We argue that the...

Drawing on current biology, we argue that the phase space of economic evolution is not stable. Thus, there are no entailing laws of economic dynamics. In this sense, economic dynamics are creative and the economy is not a causal system. Because economic dynamics are creative, the implicit frame...

Institutions and the incentives they create can be designed or redesigned to produce desired outcomes. But design does not work if social and economic dynamics are “creative.” If it is impossible to know in advance how an institution will change behavior and incentives — and what interests...

In response to Pelikan, Witt, Foster, and Colander, we reiterate our main contributions: (1) our more careful demonstration of why ‘mechanistic’ models have limited application, (2) our account of novelty as a system-level phenomenon, and (3) our identification of ‘novelty...

In this article we challenge the notion of the efficiency of factor markets and provide an alternative. We specifically identify both the environment- and actor-related origins of heterogeneity in markets. We first discuss how environments have an exaptive nature, where new uses and...

In this article we critically examine the use of Big Data in the legal system. Big Data is driving a trend towards behavioral optimization and “personalized law,” in which legal decisions and rules are optimized for best outcomes and where law is tailored to individual consumers based on...

In this paper we address the hard problem of search. Search is a pervasive phenomenon of biological and economic life. But search is hard—especially in uncertain and dynamic environments. We develop a generalized form of question-answer probing as a way of simplifying search, with implications...

Where do new resources come from? We build on the premise that environments feature vast reservoirs of latent resources, uses and resource combinations. However, identifying this value can be costly and difficult. In this paper we consider the thought experiment of an endowment-less firm and how...