Behavioral (e.g. consumption) patterns of boundedly rational agents can lead these agents intolearning dynamics that appear to be “wasteful” in terms of well-being or welfare. Within settingsdisplaying preference endogeneity, it is however still unclear how to conceptualize well-being.This...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of culturalevolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how thebiased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influencesagents’...

This paper shows how sustainable consumption patterns can spread within a population viaprocesses of social learning even though a strong individual learning bias may favorenvironmentally harmful products. We present a model depicting how the biased transmission ofdifferent behaviors via...

This paper relates firm size and opportunism by showing that, given certain behavioraldispositions of humans, the size of a profit-maximizing firm can be determined by cognitiveaspects underlying firm-internal cultural transmission processes. We argue that what firms dobetter than markets –...

Local industrial clusters have attracted much attention in the recenteconomic and geographical literature. A huge number of case studies have beenconducted. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the case studies of 159 localindustrial clusters in various countries and industries. Based on an...

A stochastic model of the evolution of the firm population in a regionand industry is developed. This model is used to make predictions about theexpected probability distribution of the firm number in regions and their dynamics.Data on the spatial distribution of firms in Germany is used to...

This paper studies the frequency of observing a certain number offirms or employees in a region for a given industry. Various predictions for thesefrequencies are deduced from theoretical considerations. Then, the empirical distri-butions of 198 industries in Germany are analysed. It is found...

A growing body of work emphasizes the role that the spatial component plays in the in the innovationprocess. These perspectives brought the region’s infrastructure and its endowment withcrucial factors into the focus of research. Given that these factors do significantly influence...

In economics simulation models are used quite a lot to carry out mathematical experiments.However, the specification of the parameter set with which to run these simulations is, ingeneral, quite an adventure into the unknown. Criticism is easily found with the procedure, asit is difficult to...