Evolutionary Economics

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:

Esben Sloth Andersen, Evolutionary Economics: Post-Schumpetrian Contributions [The man has this hideous way of dragging out obscure methodological arguments, but once you cut through those parts, it's rather good]
Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution
Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction
Paul Krugman, "What Economists Can Learn from Evolutionary Theorists"
Richard R. Nelson, "Evolutionary Theories of Cultural Change: An Empirical Perspective" ["the standard articulations of a Universal Darwinism put forth by biologists and philosophers tends to be too narrow, in particular too much linked to the details of evolution in biology, to fit with what is known about cultural evolution." PDF preprint.]
Nelson and Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change [To be honest, I've not finished this yet, but I have gotten far enough to agree that it deserves to be a standard work]
Reinhard Selten, "Evolution, Learning, and Economic Behavior", Games and Economic Behavior 3 (1991): 3--24 [In the form of a dialogue between a Bayesian, an economist, an experimental psychologist, an adaptationist biologist, a population geneticist, and an ethologist]
John Sutton [Finally an economist who appreciates (a) evolutionary thinking and (b) the importance of neutrality and null models]
- Technology and Market Structure: Theory and History
- "Flexibility, Profitability and Survival in an (Objective) Model of Knightian Uncertainty" [PDF preprint. Decision-making when the crucial variable is the indicator function of an unmeasurable set, i.e., one which doesn't actually have a probability.]
- Sunk Costs and Market Structure
H. Peyton Young, Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions [Review: A Myopic (and Sometimes Blind) Eye on the Main Chance, or, the Origins of Custom]

Jenna Bednar and Scott Page, "Games Theory and Culture" [PDF]
Michel Benaïm and Jörgen W. Weibull, "Deterministic Approximation of Stochastic Evolution in Games", Econometrica 71 (2003): 879--903 [JSTOR]
Lawrence E. Blume and David Easley
- "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? Belief Selection in Complete and Incomplete Markets," SFI Working Paper 01-06-031
- "Optimality and Natural Selection in Markets," SFI Working Paper 98-09-0 82
Samuel Bowles and Suresh Naidu, "Persistent Institutions" [PDF preprint]
Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young (eds.), Social Dynamics
Richard W. England (ed.), Evolutionary Concepts in Contemporary Economics [Contains an absolutely appalling essay by a pair of dyed-in-the-wool Althusserians, and England on entropy isn't much better; but Hodgson is good, and so is Nelson, and the rest are at least passable]
Alexis Jacquemin, The New Industrial Organization: Market Forces and Strategic Behavior ["New" in 1985, when this was published in French as Selection et pouvoir dans la nouvelle economie industrielle. Still, good on the relationships between evolutionary processes and strategic behavior, and the weakness of the evolution-to-optimality arguments. The last sections, on sociobiology and the meaning of life, are however very weak.]

Howard Aldrich, Organizations Evolving
A. A. Berle, Natural Selection of Political Forces
Kenneth Boulding, Evolutionary Economics
Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi, "Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 110 (2013): 8830--8835
Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan, The Demography of Corporations and Industries
Choi, Paradigms and Conventions
Day and Chen (eds.), Non-Linear Dynamics and Evolutionary Economics
John De La Mothe and Gilles Paquet (eds.), Evolutionary Economics and the New International Political Economy
Delmore and Dorfer (eds.), The Political Economy of Diversity: Evolutionary Perspectives on Economic Order and Disorder
Kurt Dopfer (ed.), The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics
Peter Dorman, "The Coordinated Activity Theory of the Firm", ssrn/3152090 (2018)
Heather J. Goldsb, Anna Dornhaus, Benjamin Kerr, and Charles Ofria, "Task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor and shifts in individuality", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 109 (2012): 13686--13691
Wendell Gordon and John Adams, Economics as Social Science: An Evolutionary Approach
Peter Hall, Innovation, Economics and Evolution: Theoretical Perspectives on Changing Technology in Economic Systems
David Boyce Hamilton, Evolutionary Economics: A Study of Change in Economic Thought
Hardy Hanappi, Evolutionary Economics: The Evolutionary Revolution in the Social Sciences
Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman, Organizational Ecology
Hodgson
- Evolution and Economics: Bringing Life Back Into Economics
- Economics and Institutions
Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thorbjorn Knudsen, "The firm as an interactor: firms as vehicles for habits and routines", Journal of Evolutionary Economics 14 (2004): 281--307
Richard N. Langlois and Paul L. Robertson, Firms, Markets and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions
Birgitte Sloth and Hans Jorgen Whitta-Jacobsen, "Economic Darwinism", Theory and Decision 70 (2011): 385--398
Sten A. O. Thore, The Diversity, Complexity and Evolution of High Tech Capitalism
Philippe van Parijs, Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences
Thorstein Veblen, "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?", Quarterly Journal of Economics 12 (1898): 373--397[JSTOR; plain text transcription]
Jack J. Vromen, Economic Evolution: An Inquiry into the Foundations of the New Institutional Economics