Kludged

Jeffrey C. Ely

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2011, vol. 3, issue 3, pages 210-31

Abstract: Is there reason to believe that our brains have evolved to make efficient decisions so that the details of the internal process are irrelevant? I develop a model which illustrates a limitation of adaptive processes: improvements tend to come in the form of kludges. A kludge is a marginal adaptation that compensates for, but does not eliminate, fundamental design inefficiencies. When kludges accumulate, the result can be perpetually suboptimal behavior even in a model of evolution in which arbitrarily large innovations occur infinitely, often with probability 1. (JEL D03, D87)

JEL-codes: D03 D87 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
Note: DOI: 10.1257/mic.3.3.210
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