Economic Darwinism

Birgitte Sloth () and Hans Jørgen Whitta-Jacobsen
Additional contact information
Hans Jørgen Whitta-Jacobsen: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

No 2006-01, CIE Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: evolutionary game theory; Darwinian evolution; economic selection; mutation; evolutionary equilibrium; stochastic stability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2006-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ku.dk/cie/dp/dp_2003-2006/2006-01.pdf/ (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.econ.ku.dk/cie/dp/dp_2003-2006/2006-01.pdf/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.econ.ku.dk/cie/dp/dp_2003-2006/2006-01.pdf/)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic Darwinism (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuieci:2006-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIE Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Industrial Economics �ster Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().