This entry discusses the concept of "systemism", elaborates how it implicitly underpinned most seminal works of evolutionary-institutional economics, and explains how future research would benefit from making the systemist nature of evolutionary economics more explicit. More precisely, the paper...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e. the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...

In this conceptual paper, we discuss the evolutionary root causes of institutional complexity, defined as inherently incompatible prescriptions when different sources of institutions intersect at the same space and time. We suggest that societies are not delineated by clear-cut boundaries, but...

There are several ways to incorporate evolutionary concepts into economic thinking. This article reviews the most important transfers of this kind into evolutionary economics. It broadly differentiates between approaches that draw on an analogy construction to the biological sphere, those that...

The concept of institution has been used by scholars from across a number of disciplines to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, the philosophical roots of this concept have not been well examined, nor have implications for contemporary institutional analysis been fully appreciated....