The growing economic value and consumer popularity of sustainability standards inevitably raise questions about the extent to which their structure and dynamics actually address many environmental, economic and public welfare issues. The Committee on Sustainable Assessment (COSA) was formed, in...

This chapter argues that evolutionary economics should be founded upon complex systems theory rather than neo-Darwinian analogies concerning natural selection, which focus on supply side considerations and competition amongst firms and technologies. It suggests that conceptions such as...

Like many consumer products, household mortgages have experienced significant innovation in recent decades, with mortgages becoming cheaper, more accessible, and with more features. Many observers have expected that this would increase demand for houses, contributing to a rise in house prices....

The stance of Australia’s central authorities with respect to residential mortgage innovation appears different from many of our international counterparts. In this article we provide an interpretation of this policy stance, concluding that signals are arguably a more prominent feature of...

This paper revisits the welfare economics of fashion from the standpoint of evolutionary economics. Whilst accepting that fashion-focused consumption may have an element of status-seeking behaviour about it, which may be of questionable value in welfare terms, the paper emphasizes that fashion...

This paper explores the interconnections between two of Herbert Simon's key concepts, bounded rationality and decomposability, and show how this unity provides the starting point for merging cognitively focused approaches to behavioral economics with evolutionary/institutional economics into a...

We develop a new methodology for evolutionary economic modelling, based upon the ‘micro-meso-macro’ analytical framework for dealing with behaviour in complex economic systems. This new methodology involves a combination of computational, historical and econometric methods. It is argued that...