Diversification is a fundamental concept in economics, decision theory and finance. It also lies at the core of the Darwinian evolution argument, and diversifying behavior known as bet-hedging has been widely documented in other species. The central premise of this paper is that attitudes...

Armen Alchian was one of the great economists of the twentieth century, and his 1950 paper, Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, one of the most important contributions to the economic literature. Anticipating modern behavioral economics, Alchian explains that firms most decidedly do not...

This article illustrates a formal link between economic growth and longstanding quantitative measures of information and knowledge. The link is found by relating two concepts from evolutionary theory, namely the Price equation and bet-hedging (stochastic switching). The first part of the article...

We introduce evolutionary dynamics for two-action games where agents with diverse preferences use statistical inference to guide their behavior. In each period, agents are randomly selected to revise actions. They draw a random sample of other agents’ actions, use statistical inference to...

Neoclassical theoretical approaches dominate modern health economics. However, the peculiarities of healthcare provision are so unusual that neoclassical theory is especially unsuited to the area. Even mainstream health economists often abandon Paretian welfare considerations to focus on needs...

We consider the evolution of preferences when trade occurs between two countries. We show that if one country is much larger than the other, its preferences can eventually take over the preferences of the second country. This result may provide an explanation of why small countries sometimes...

We show that a set of outcomes outside the convex hull of Nash equilibria can be asymptotically stable with respect to convex monotonic evolutionary dynamics. Boundedly rational agents receive signals and condition the choice of strategies on the signals. A set of conditional strategies is...

Human utility embodies a number of seemingly irrational aspects. The leading example in this paper is that utilities often depend on the presence of salient unchosen alternatives. Our focus is to understand <i>why</i> an evolutionary process might optimally lead to such seemingly dysfunctional features...

Recently, the maximum entropy principle has been applied to explain the evolution of complex non-equilibrium systems, such as the Earth system. I argue that it can also be fruitfully deployed to reconsider the classical treatment of entropy in economics by Georgescu-Roegen, if the growth of...

This article considers the robustness of long run equilibria when mutation rates are not assumed to be constant over time. Particular attention is paid to the case where mutation rates decline to zero in the limit. It is found that if behaviour is ergodic, then it corresponds to the long run...