According to the advocates of a "Generalized Darwinism" (GD), the three Darwinian principles of variation, selection and retention can and should be used as a meta-theoretical framework for the explanation of evolutionary processes in the socio¬cultural domain. Despite their biological origins,...

Schumpeter’s and Hayek’s view of market coordination as being not about efficiency, but about endogenous change and never-ending discovery has been increasingly recognized even by the mainstream of economics. Underlying this view is the notion of creative learning agents who bring...

Economic change, while promoting innovation and growth, at the same time generates "gales of creative destruction". It is still largely unclear what this concept implies for the task of assessing welfare (and, correspondingly, the need for and scope of policy-making) in a novelty-generating,...

Explaining individual behavior in politics should rely on the same motivational assumptions as explaining behavior in the market: That's what Political Economy, understood as the application of economics to the study of political processes, is all about. In its standard variant, those who played...

Der sogenannte Libertäre Paternalismus, der in den letzten Jahren mit dem Politikinstrument des Nudging hervorgetreten ist, weist in seinen konzeptionellen Grundlagen eine Reihe problematischer Eigenschaften auf. Insbesondere dient der Homo oeconomicus als normatives Rollenmodell, der...

This paper delivers a step toward a naturalistic foundation of the social contract. While mainstream social contract theory is based on an original position model that is defined in an aprioristic way, we endogenize its key elements, i.e., develop them out of the individuals’ moral common...

Markets for complex, multi-faceted goods normally require a complex institutionalframework to function properly, i.e., to lead to patterns of outcomes that are deemedacceptable by the individuals involved. This paper examines the institutionalunderpinnings of the market for urban land use...

According to the principle of Normative Individualism, the evaluation of economicstates and processes should be guided exclusively by the wishes of the individuals whoare seen as the only bearer of values. Despite its intuitive appeal and its almost universalacceptance in normative economics...

According to the advocates of a “Generalized Darwinism” (GD), the three coreDarwinian principles of variation, selection and retention (or inheritance) can be used as ageneral framework for the development of theories explaining evolutionary processes inthe socioeconomic domain. Even though...