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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Hanappi, Hardy |
| Abstract: | Since the 16th century, several forms of the capitalist mode of production have shaped the evolution of the human species. Any closer inspection of the concept of evolution reveals that it is a name for a dynamic, which incorporates several underlying contradictions. Seen from a larger perspective, a unifying characteristic of the evolution of capitalism is necessary to justify the use of a common name for this time period. But parallel to this necessity, partly contradicting it, a set of shorter stages of capitalism is needed to understand how the long-run phenomena could emerge at all. During each of these stages, some well-working mechanisms can be identified, which first led to a surge of this stage; and later, due to their working, these same mechanisms led to a partial collapse of the stage. In these shorter revolutionary intermezzi that often took several decades, new mechanisms were entering social evolution to maintain capitalism’s basic thrust and, at the same time, to overcome the obstacles of the previous stage. There clearly is a kind of fractal structure in such a historical treatment of capitalism’s evolution: Within each stage of capitalism, mid-range pulsations, sometimes called business cycles, can be observed which resemble the characteristics of the stage within which they are embedded. Of course, capitalism is a broad social formation and cannot be reduced to a simple core of stylised economic behaviour in the fashion of ‘achieving the highest output with scarce resources’. It extends to geopolitical power constellations as well as to cultural traits of capitalism’s stages. Capitalism, in its long-run evolution, in its historical mission, brought about mainly two achievements: A tremendous increase in labour productivity and a more and more sophisticated design for a global democratic institutional framework guiding the species into the next, non-capitalist mode of production. Evolutionary and institutional economics are the sub-disciplines of political economy that traditionally assembled research in this area. And the consideration of the stages of capitalism is the place where the inner workings of the dialectics of continuity and break can be best investigated. |
| Keywords: | Stages of Capitalism |
| JEL: | B51 B52 |
| Date: | 2026–05–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:129013 |
| By: | Biroli, Pietro (University of Bologna); Martin-Bassols, Nicolau (University of Bologna); Marees, Andries T. (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); van Kippersluis, Hans (Tinbergen Institute; Erasmus University Rotterdam); A. Rietveld, Cornelius (Tinbergen Institute; Erasmus University Rotterdam); Arce, Pia (University of Zurich); Thom, Kevin (University of Iowa); von Hinke, Stephanie (University of Bristol); Vollen, Jeremy (Northwestern University); Galama, Titus (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute; 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 social-science 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 science genetics, ESSGN |
| JEL: | I14 I24 J24 D31 C38 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18607 |
| By: | Zhe Sage Chen; Quanyan Zhu |
| Abstract: | We propose a game-theoretic framework for adaptive multi-agent intelligent systems. Unlike classical game theory, which often treats strategies as primitive objects chosen by perfectly rational agents, the proposed framework provides a mathematical foundation for studying equilibrium in NeuroAI and can be viewed as an extension of game theory under relaxed assumptions, including partial observability, bounded computation, and uncertainty. At its core, Multilevel Interactive Equilibrium (MIE) generalizes the classical Nash equilibrium to intelligent systems with internal computation. Rather than being defined solely at the level of observable behavior, equilibrium emerges when neural learning dynamics, cognitive representations, and behavioral strategies mutually stabilize between interacting agents. This framework applies uniformly to interactions between two biological brains, two artificial agents, or hybrid human-AI systems. We discuss applications of multilevel game theory to human-autonomous vehicle driving, human-machine interaction, human-large language model (LLM) interaction, and computational psychiatry. We also outline experimental strategies and computational methods for estimating MIE and discuss challenges and prospects for future research. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.10505 |
| By: | Stark, Oded (University of Bonn); Kosiorowski, Grzegorz (Krakow University of Economics) |
| Abstract: | We establish a new approach to the modeling of cooperation, and we formulate a new solution concept for cooperative games. We do this by constructing a game of cooperation between individuals who exhibit distaste for relative deprivation, RD, in the sense that they experience stress when their income is lower than that of their comparators. In such a game, the sharing out of the jointly earned income between these individuals when they cooperate, as prescribed by standard solutions of cooperative games, might not be acceptable to the individuals. The stress from RD may have the upper hand. Measuring stress by RD, we thus model a setting in which two individuals who are concerned with being relatively deprived need to decide whether or not to cooperate. We term this setting an RD cooperative game, and we design a rule, the RD solution, for the distribution of the income yielded in this game. The RD solution prescribes cooperation in spite of cooperation-induced stress and preserves the spirit of standardness (an equal sharing of the gain that accrues from cooperation) for two-player games (a property shared by the main solution concepts for cooperative games). |
| Keywords: | inclination to cooperate, cooperative games, social preferences, cooperation-induced stress, relative deprivation (RD), RD cooperative games, RD solution |
| JEL: | D01 D30 D63 D71 D91 |
| Date: | 2026–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18608 |
| By: | Ari Ercole |
| Abstract: | Health artificial intelligence (AI) adoption presents a paradox: point-solution tools diffuse readily through clinical populations, yet system-change AI, which carries the greatest potential for pathway-level transformation, consistently stalls at partial adoption. An evolutionary game theoretic model is developed to explain this pattern. Doctors choose among three strategies: genuine adoption, partial adoption, and rejection, where genuine adoption is required for systemic benefits to materialise above a population threshold. The system is shown to be generically bistable, with a stable partial adoption equilibrium coexisting alongside full genuine adoption. The basin of attraction of the partial adoption trap is enlarged by three compounding failure modes: a threshold coordination failure arising from the non-appropriable nature of systemic benefits; a trust failure arising from the organisation's inability to credibly commit to sharing productivity gains; and a cultural failure arising from negative coordination norms among doctors. These failure modes are shown to be most severe precisely for the technologies with the greatest systemic value: the Value-Adoption Paradox. A cost ratchet dynamic implies that failed adoption attempts permanently lower barriers even when embedding fails, but this benefit is offset when trust erosion is rapid. Conditions are derived under which sustained but imperfect adoption pressure is welfare-improving, and the policy architecture required to escape the trap (targeting trust, sequencing, and team-level adoption) is characterised. Standard health system digital transformation policy, which typically addresses only the threshold failure through individual incentives, is predicted to systematically produce the partial adoption trap. |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2605.17388 |