Hayek's well-known evolutionary concept of "competition as a discovery procedure" can be characterized as a parallel process of experimentation, in which rivalrous firms generate and test hypotheses about the best way to fulfill the consumers' preferences. Through this permanent process of...

Decentralised experimentation and mutual learning of public policies is seen as one of the important advantages of federal systems (Oates: laboratory federalism). Based upon Hayekian ideas of the advantages of decentralised experimentation (as a discovery procedure), we analyse the long-term...

We investigate a selection-mutation model for the dynamics of technological innovation,a special case of reaction-diffusion equations. Although mutations are assumed to increase the variety of technologies, not their average success (fitness), they are an essential prerequisite for innovation....