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'...

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 order to revamp Rhetoric as a methodological approach in Economics, this paper combines natural selection in evolution and the psychology of confirmatory bias. This latter can be thought of as a second best adaptation to the forces of natural selection and can also be an evolutionary stable...

This paper reconsiders the explanation of economic policy from an evolutionary economics perspective. It contrasts the neoclassical equilibrium notions of market and government failure with the dominant evolutionary neo-Schumpeterian and Austrian-Hayekian perceptions. Based on this comparison,...

We present a common analytical framework for evolutionary and institutional economics, conceived as the study of systems that do not tend toward, nor necessarily fluctuate around, a steady state. Using an evolutionary equation, we derive an analytical theory of the relation between resource...

How do ideas evolve? Can one speak of scientific progress when there is more than one pathway of intellectual evolution in which different ideas emerge and flow in different directions? Is the history of economic analysis a compilation of a number of intellectual pathways? This essay argues that...

Path dependency is defined, and three different specific concepts of path dependency – cumulative causation, lock in, and hysteresis – are analyzed. The relationships between path dependency and equilibrium, and path dependency and fundamental uncertainty are also discussed. Finally, a...

The paper questions the idea that a biology-based perspective, and more specifically Darwinian population thinking, constitutes a real alternative for the study of the evolution of social systems. This is done through a critical appraisal of the work of Thorstein Veblen. Even though Veblen's...

Recent debates in evolutionary economics over Universal Darwinism suffer from a biased emphasis on Neo-Darwinism. This paper argues in favour of Holistic Darwinism as a reference for methodological transfers. I survey major biological advances in evolutionary theory which challenge the...

This paper uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this paper that,...