The Role of Biology and Culturein Veblenian Consumption Dynamics

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of culturalevolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how thebiased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influencesagents’ consumption behavior. Thereby, the model’s learning dynamics are capable of generatingtypical Veblenian consumption dynamics. Based on these insights, the paper then scrutinizes onthe role of humans’ biological heritage and Darwinian concepts in the development of economictheories in general. Moreover, the relation of the ontological basis of biological and culturalevolution is addressed...