One reason why firms exist, this paper argues, is because they are suitable organizations within which cooperative production systems based on human social predispositions can evolve. In addition, we show how an entrepreneur - given these predispositions - can shape human behavior within a firm....

This paper relates firm size and opportunism by showing that, given certain behavioral dispositions of humans, the size of a profit-maximizing firm can be determined by cognitive aspects underlying firm-internal cultural transmission processes. We argue that what firms do better than markets -...

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’...

This paper shows how sustainable consumption patterns can spread within a population viaprocesses of social learning even though a strong individual learning bias may favorenvironmentally harmful products. We present a model depicting how the biased transmission ofdifferent behaviors via...

This paper analyzes how the qualitative change in human labor occurs in mutualdependence with the advancement of the epistemic base of technology. Historically, arecurrent pattern can be identified: humans learned to successively transfer laborqualities to machines. The subsequent release of...

Behavioral (e.g. consumption) patterns of boundedly rational agents can lead these agents intolearning dynamics that appear to be “wasteful” in terms of well-being or welfare. Within settingsdisplaying preference endogeneity, it is however still unclear how to conceptualize well-being.This...