Blockchains are a new digital technology that combines peer-to-peer network computing and cryptography to create an immutable decentralised public ledger. When the ledger records money, a blockchain is a cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin. But ledger entries can record any data structure, including...

For the past century economists have proposed a suite of theories relating to industrial dynamics, technological change and innovation. There has been an implication in these models that the institutional environment is stable. However, a new class of institutional technologies — most notably...

Building on the ontology of evolutionary realism recently proposed by Dopfer and Potts (forthcoming), we develop an analytical framework for evolutionary economics with a micro-meso-macro architecture. The motive for reconception is to make clear the highly complex and emergent nature of...

The renaissance in evolutionary economics in the past two decades has brought with it a great deal of theoretical development and interdisciplinary import. Much of this has been useful, but not all of it has been commensurate. In this paper, we make the case for the limits to theoretical...

The structure and dynamics of knowledge is central to modern evolutionary economics. In the canonical evolutionary model, knowledge exists in the routines and competencies of firms, an approach optimized to study industrial dynamics. In mainstream economics however, knowledge is represented as...

We propose a new model of intellectual property that presents a different view to the market failure/monopoly rent model advanced by Arrow (1962) in which governments protect inventors from private theft. Instead, using Olson (1993), we represent a public theft model of intellectual property...

We propose a stylized and tractable Neo-Schumpeterian model of sectorial transformations in which demand side knowledge constraints inhibit innovation diffusion and industrial change, causing structural instability. Evolutionary competition in the model implies that innovation can overshoot the...

Investment is a function of expected profit, which involves calculation of the cost of trust. Blockchain technology is a new institutional technology (Davidson et al 2018) that industrialises trust (Berg et al 2018). We therefore expect that the adoption of blockchain technology into the economy...

Knowledge about property rights is a commons that facilitates market exchange and economic coordination. The governance of that shared knowledge resource—the various formal and informal rules that maintain ledgers of property rights—ranges from community norms to formal state registries. In...

Democracy is an economic problem of choice constrained by transaction costs and information costs. Society must choose between competing institutional frameworks for the conduct of voting and elections. These decisions are constrained by the technologies and institutions available. Blockchains...