Piracy in international waters is on the rise again, in particular off the coast of Somalia. While the dynamic game between pirates, ship-owners, insurance firms and the military seems to have reached some kind of equilibrium, piracy risks generating significant negative externalities to third...

Explaining individual behavior in politics should rely on the same motivational assumptions as explaining behavior in the market: That’s what Political Economy, understood as the application of economics to the study of political processes, is all about. In its standard variant, those who...

Public choice theory has originally been motivated by the need to correct the asymmetry, widespread in traditional welfare economics, between the motivational assumptions of market participants and policymakers: Those who played the game of politics should also be considered rational and...

According to the “Generalized Darwinism” movement (GD), the three principles of variation, selection and retention/replication (labeled “Darwinian” in some variants of GD) can and should be used as a meta-theoretical framework for the explanation of evolutionary processes in the...

<Para ID="Par1">In his article “Should evolutionary economists embrace libertarian paternalism?”(Journal of Evolutionary Economics 24(3), <CitationRef CitationID="CR2">2014</CitationRef>, 515–539) Martin Binder discusses the pros and cons of “libertarian paternalism” (LP) from an explicitly evolutionary viewpoint, concluding that as a general...</citationref></para>

Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution has always generated controversy. Interest in Hayek’s theory, and others’ analysis and criticism of it, has been rising of late. This volume urges a reconsideration of Hayeks’ theory of evolution and aims to explore the relevance...

Economic change, while promoting innovation and growth, at the same time generates "gales of creative destruction". It is still largely unclear what this concept implies for the task of assessing welfare (and, correspondingly, the need for and scope of policy-making) in a novelty-generating,...

While Evolutionary Economics has devoted much attention to the attempt to explain the evolution of institutions that emerge spontaneously, the genesis, diffusion and evaluation of consciously designed institutions has largely been neglected. This paper tries to show (i) how an evolutionary...