We survey the phenomenon of the growth of firms drawing on literature from economics, management, and sociology. We begin with a review of empirical 'stylised facts' before discussing theoretical contributions. Firm growth is characterized by a predominant stochastic element, making it difficult...

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning processes driving cultural evolution increases individual's economic gains. The key assumption is that human populations are...

In an evolutionary approach to macroeconomics, the market disequilibrium dynamics resulting from structural change need to be properly represented at the aggregate level. As suggested by the late F.A.Hayek, a suitable equilibrium concept required to this end as a frame of reference, is that of a...

Management scholars have long stressed the importance of evolutionary processses for inter-firm cooperation but have mostly missed the promising opportunity to incorporate ideas from evolutionary theories into the analysis of collaborative arrangements. In this paper, we first present three...

What is special about the evolutionary approach? This question is given quite different, and partly incommensurable, answers in evolutionary economics. The present paper shows how the different answers correspond with, on the one hand, the particular heuristic twists by which the corresponding...

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

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'...

Schumpeterian 'development from within' requires imagination, skill and motivation; so does Cattaneo's 'psychology of wealth'. Neither can be encompassed by models that rely on deductive rationality, but are twin products of Knightian uncertainty, where the absence of demonstrably correct...