Economic Darwinism

Research output: Working paperResearch

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  • 2006-01

    Final published version, 379 KB, PDF document

We define an evolutionary process of “economic Darwinism” for playing-the-field, symmetric games. The process captures two forces. One is “economic selection”: if current behavior leads to payoff differences, behavior yielding lowest payoff has strictly positive probability of being replaced by an arbitrary behavior. The other is “mutation”: any behavior has at any point in time a strictly positive, very small probability of shifting to an arbitrary behavior. We show that behavior observed frequently is in accordance with “evolutionary equilibrium”, a static equilibrium concept suggested in the literature. Using this result, we demonstrate that generally under positive (negative) externalities, economic Darwinism implies even more under- (over-) activity than does Nash equilibrium
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationCph.
PublisherCentre for Industrial Economics, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
Number of pages24
Publication statusPublished - 2006

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - evolutionary game theory, Darwinian evolution, mutation, economic selection, evolutionary equilibrium, stochastic stability

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