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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Snower, Dennis |
| Abstract: | Evolutionary economics explains economic change through variation, selection, retention, transmission, innovation, and institutional transformation, whereas much of economics explains outcomes through purposive choice. This article argues that these modes of explanation become recursively connected once economic agents can represent the evolutionary processes in which they participate and intentionally alter their operation. It develops the concept of reflexive economic evolution: agents do not merely choose within given constraints or adapt to existing selection pressures, but can generate new possibilities, modify selection environments, organize transmission, and sometimes revise the criteria and mechanisms by which variants are selected. This latter second-order capacity is termed meta selection. Reflexive economic evolution does not imply comprehensive control or a predetermined social end-state: guidance changes the distribution of possible trajectories under uncertainty rather than determining a trajectory. The framework shows how intentional and evolutionary explanations can be causally complementary, why effective agency is partly endogenous, and why policy should be understood not only as changing current outcomes but also as reshaping the evolutionary environment in which subsequent adaptation and innovation occur. |
| Keywords: | Evolutionary economics; economic methodology; agency; reflexivity; causation; meta selection; institutions; teleology |
| JEL: | B41 B52 D02 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:amz:wpaper:2026-23 |
| By: | Pietro Biroli (University of Zurich); Nicolau Martin-Bassols (University of Bologna); Andries Marees (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Hans van Kippersluis (Erasmus University); Cornelius Rietveld (Erasmus University); Pia Arce (University of Zurich); Kevin Thom (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee); Stephanie von Hinke (University of Bristol, Erasmus University, and Institute for Fiscal Studies); Jeremy Vollen (University of Zurich); Titus Galama (University of Southern California) |
| Abstract: | The start of a human’s life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into (nurture). These set in motion a trajectory, from birth onward, in health and human capital. Leveraging three longitudinal socialscience data sets, we systematically analyze the relationship between an individual’s genotype, the socioeconomic status (SES) of the families they grew up in, and their realized traits in adulthood. We proxy an individual’s genetic predisposition by polygenic indexes (PGIs) and family SES by a latent factor of parental education and father’s (former) occupational status. We then investigate how PGIs, parental SES, and their interaction contribute to later-life outcomes across a range of forty-five socioeconomic, anthropometric, health, behavioral, and personality traits. We find strong genetic and socioeconomic associations with these phenotypes, but no evidence of sizable gene-environment interactions. |
| Keywords: | gene-by-environment interplay, genoeconomics, polygenic indices, social sciences genetics, ESSGN |
| JEL: | I14 I00 J24 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2026-007 |
| By: | Mélusine Boon-Falleur (DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres); Nicolas Baumard (DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres); Jean-Baptiste André (DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, IJN - Institut Jean-Nicod - DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CdF (institution) - Collège de France - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) |
| Abstract: | Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences. In this article, we build on the theory of optimal resource allocation to propose an alternative framework. We hypothesize that the quantity of resources available, such as income, has downstream consequences on psychological traits, leading to the emergence of behavioral syndromes. We show that more resources lead to more long-term orientation, more tolerance of variance, and more investment in low marginal-benefit needs. At the behavioral level, this translates, among others, into more large-scale cooperation, more investment in health, and more exploration. These individual-level differences in behavior, in turn, account for cultural phenomena such as puritanism, authoritarianism, and innovation. |
| Keywords: | application, policy, evolutionary psychology, income, individual differences, patience, personality, risk-taking |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04875985 |
| By: | Yosuke Hashidate |
| Abstract: | We study a mechanism of cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). Incorporating social preferences as efficiency concerns into the PD game, we study how altruism translates into cooperation. Under complete information, cooperation requires the opponent's altruism to clear a threshold. We then introduce a subjective extension of Bayesian Nash equilibrium that relaxes the Common Prior Assumption, letting players hold heterogeneous, potentially misspecified beliefs about each other's altruistic type. Cooperation then depends on beliefs about altruism rather than altruism itself, and can be sustained even when opponents are, on average, only weakly altruistic. When fear of exploitation dominates the temptation to defect, beliefs about the opponent's cooperation become strategic complements, so a cooperative and an uncooperative equilibrium can coexist under identical payoffs and an identical, correctly specified prior. Using multiplier preferences, we then study how robust this belief-driven cooperation is to model misspecification. Cooperation is fragile: it survives only above a threshold level of confidence in one's own belief, and can unravel even when the belief itself correctly supports cooperation. As a formal extension, the same robust-control apparatus, applied to a player's action choice, nests Nash equilibrium, Bayesian Nash equilibrium, and logit Quantal Response Equilibrium as limiting cases. Cooperation depends less on how altruistic agents are than on what they believe about each other, and how confident they are that this belief is right. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.11374 |
| By: | Ryan Oprea; Michael Woodford |
| Abstract: | The cognitive noise hypothesis is an increasingly popular explanation for a wide range of puzzling regularities in human behavior. Using simple, familiar tools and minimal assumptions drawn from neuroscience, cognitive noise models provide a parsimonious, unified explanation for a number of the most important anomalies documented in behavioral economics. The hypothesis proposes that limited cognitive resources force the brain to represent information imprecisely, generating coarser decisions, stochastic behavior and subjective uncertainty. Because brains deal with this kind of imprecision in a broadly Bayesian manner, imprecision leads to a number of well-known behavioral biases that may in fact be optimal given that imprecision. Because brains also allocate scarce cognitive resources adaptively, these biases and their severity are impacted by seemingly-irrelevant aspects of the choice environment, providing an explanation for a number of well-known context and experience effects that are otherwise difficult to explain. We review the basic structure of these models, their behavioral consequences, and the growing body of empirical evidence supporting them. |
| JEL: | D81 D91 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35714 |
| By: | Eleonora Guarnieri; Ana Tur-Prats |
| Abstract: | Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we show that a society's risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss, is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these norms differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we start by showing that languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction than those from male-dominant societies. We propose a conceptual framework in which male-dominant societies are more expansionist via two channels: (i) military capacity sustained through surplus extraction, and (ii) demographic pressure through women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor. As a result, they expand at the expense of more gender-egalitarian groups. We test this prediction in two empirical settings. Leveraging European colonization as a natural experiment, we find that Indigenous societies with more gender-equal norms than their colonizers are more vulnerable to cultural extinction. We examine alternative pre-colonial societal arrangements and find that cultural extinction is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than in hierarchy or dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighboring groups' gender structure across Africa, we further show that languages from gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in grid cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting language expansion across the continent. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, language extinction, gender norms, Inter-group contact |
| JEL: | Z10 O10 F54 J16 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12968 |
| By: | Eleanor A. Power; Monique Borgerhoff Mulder; Samuel Bowles; Matthew O. Jackson; Jeremy Koster; Daniel Redhead; Thomas Rutter; Sahana Subramanyam; Justin Weltz; Nurul Alam; Sarah Alami; Alexandra Alvergne; Curtis Atkisson; Michele Barnes; Bret Beheim; Christine M. Beitl; Madeline Brown; Mark Caudell; Wendy Ch\'{a}vez-P\'{a}ez; Komal Chauhan; Joshua Cinner; Siobh\'{a}n Cully; Augusto Dalla Ragione; Angelina L. DeMarco; Ivan Deschenaux; Federico Fernandez; Juan Pablo Ferreiro; Drew Gerkey; Matthew Gervais; Christopher Golden; Gianluca Grimalda; Werner Hertzog; Paul L. Hooper; Karen Kramer; Geoff Kushnick; Banrida Langstieh; Rodrigo Lazo; Sheina Lew-Levy; Shane Macfarlan; Emmanuel Maliti; Karl J. Mertens; Madalena Monteban; Rafael Morais Chiaravalloti; Daniel Murphy; Kathryn Oths; Alejandro P\'{e}rez Velilla; Emily Post; Sean Prall; Cody Ross; Anirudh Sankar; Brooke Scelza; Michael Schnegg; Edmond Seabright; Mary K. Shenk; Kathrine E. Starkweather; Chun-Yi Sum; Bram Tucker; Bapu Vaitla; Vivek Venkataraman; John P. Ziker |
| Abstract: | Despite theory tying wealth inequality to social structure, empirical evidence has been limited to a few studies based on online social media data. This study uses a very different type of data, expands the global coverage to very different types of societies, and investigates new questions. In particular, we collect data from ~3500 sharing units (households) in 46 communities across the globe, representing considerable human social and cultural diversity. In each, we analyze the relationship between people's material wealth and the structure of social networks: borrowing money, sharing food, working together, socializing, etc. In almost all communities, a sharing unit's material wealth is positively associated with the number of other sharing units it both helps and is helped by. A sharing unit's wealth is also associated with the relative wealth of the sharing units to which it is linked---a form of economic homophily. Notably, communities with greater wealth inequality are also characterized by a network structure in which poorer sharing units are less well connected to wealthier ones. We augment our unique cross-cultural data with other community-level environmental, institutional, and economic attributes, opening new avenues for future research into the co-determination of wealth and social networks. |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2608.25488 |