The Role of Biology and Culture in Veblenian Consumption Dynamics

Christian Cordes

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group

Abstract: This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of cultural evolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how the biased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influences agents’ consumption behavior. Thereby, the model’s learning dynamics are capable of generating typical Veblenian consumption dynamics. Based on these insights, the paper then scrutinizes on the role of humans’ biological heritage and Darwinian concepts in the development of economic theories in general. Moreover, the relation of the ontological basis of biological and cultural evolution is addressed.

Keywords: Conspicuous consumption; Economic theory development; Evolutionary economics; Darwinism; Cultural evolution Length 31 pages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 B41 B52 C60 D11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-hpe, nep-pke and nep-soc
Date: 2007-11
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.econ.mpg.de/evo/discussionpapers/2007-13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Role of Biology and Culture in Veblenian Consumption Dynamics (2009)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:evopap:2007-13

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/EVO/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Inken Poßner ().