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'...

The existing literature documents that computer simulations can reveal how characteristics of micro-level individuals give rise to macro-level phenomena of systemic wholes. This paper seeks to establish such an important simulation-based observation as a theoretical result on a sound foundation....

The increasing gap between the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CE & EE) with regard to both their economic and political performance cannot be explained by their different starting conditions after the breakdown of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is due to cultural...

The increasing gap between the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CE & EE) with regard to both their economic and political performance cannot be explained by their different starting conditions after the breakdown of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is due to cultural...

China's transition to a market economy has been a process of basic institutional changes and institution building. The institutional change from a socialist labour regime (SLR) as one of the backbones upholding the traditional leninist system to a new 'socialist' market labour regime (SMLR)...

The methodological individualism and subjectivism of the Austrian tradition in economics is often associated with a methodological dualism, i.e. the claim that the nature of its subject matter, namely purposeful and intentional human action, requires economics to adopt a methodology that is...

Economic behavior strives for efficiency. Therefore, also evolving network structures should be a result of such a goal-oriented behavior. Traditionally, networks were assumed to be only temporary phenomena, since the prevailing organizational forms that comply with the efficiency postulate are...

In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political...

In a series of recent papers, Mark Roe and Lucian Bebchuk have developed further the concept of path dependence, combined it with concepts of evolution and used it to challenge the wide-spread view that the corporate governance systems of the major advanced economies are likely to converge...