This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of differentbusiness strategies is conditional on the firm’s distance to the industry frontier. We usedata on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

In this paper we present an overview of methods and components of formal economic modelsemploying evolutionary approaches. This compromises two levels: (1) techniques ofevolutionary modelling, including multi-agent modelling, evolutionary algorithms andevolutionary game theory; (2) building...

Recently evolutionary economists started to pay attention to ontological issues in theirown subfield. Two projects dominate the discussions: Generalized Darwinism(henceforth: GD), promoted by Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, and theContinuity Hypothesis (henceforth: CH), put forward by...

The theoretical literature identifies three important entrepreneurial dimensions,namely discovering new opportunities, responsiveness to uncertainty, and coordination of a firm.In the empirical literature, past experience has been identified as having an important influenceon organizational...

This paper revisits Ernst Engel's (1857) original article in which he systematically in-vestigated the relationship between consumption expenditure and income. While he ismainly remembered today for the discovery of Engel's law, we highlight how Engel ad-dressed in a particular way the issue of...

Management scholars have long stressed the importance of evolutionary processsesfor inter-firm cooperation but have mostly missed the promising opportunityto incorporate ideas from evolutionary theories into the analysis of collaborativearrangements. In this paper, we first present three rules...

In a Small Fish War two agents interacting on a body of waterhave essentially two options: they can …sh with restraint or without.Fishing with restraint is not harmful; …shing without yields a higherimmediate catch, but may induce lower future catches.Inspired by recent work in biology, we...

Local industrial clusters have attracted much attention in the recenteconomic and geographical literature. A huge number of case studies have beenconducted. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the case studies of 159 localindustrial clusters in various countries and industries. Based on an...

This paper lays out an evolutionary theory for the cognitive foundations and cultural emergenceof the extravagant displays (e.g., ritual mutilation, animal sacrifice, and martyrdom) that have sooften tantalized social scientists, as well as more mundane actions that influence cultural...

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequalitybetween social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learningprocesses driving cultural evolution increases individual’s economic gains. The keyassumption is that human populations are...