Evolutionary analysis of the firm and internal selection

Evolutionary approaches of the firm devote a part of their analysis to firm behavior and to some processes acting inside the firm , however the internal workings of firms are, most of the time, not deeply analyzed. In this perspective, this paper attemps to investigate whether &quotwe can drop internal selection in the evolutionary analysis of the firm". In ordre to answer this question, we propose a micro-simulation model of internal selection where firms are engaged in production and R&D activities. They carry out two kinds of R&D and do not run any imitation process. Internal selection acts on R&D projects and we measure the impact of the selection mechanism on the firm's performances. The model generates persistent differences between firms according to their internal selection process.