In spite of the increasing concern on the role of technological change and innovation as a key factor of sustainability, environmental economics has paid little attention to the understanding of environmental innovation. Until recently, scholars working in environmental economics consider environmental innovation as induced by regulation. Within this perspective, one of the main research questi...

Given the economic, societal and environmental relevance of innovation, this paper contrasts various models of innovation, compares how innovation is understood in mainstream economics and evolutionary economics of innovation and juxtaposes the concomitant policy rationales. By discussing two monitoring tools used by the European Commission to assess its member states‟ innovation performance, i...

A view has emerged which sees Adam Smith’s main contribution to economics in terms of his equilibrium theory. This paper argues that equilibrium economics was neither Smith’s main contribution nor his chief concern. It is true that Smith made a few observations which may be construed as equilibrium economics in some loose sense. For example, his observation that the market price of a commodity ...

Background: Recent evidence suggests that individual variation in risk taking is partly due to genetic factors. Methodology/Principal Findings: We explore how self-reported risk taking in different domains correlates with variation in the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4). Past studies conflict on the influence of DRD4 in relation to risk taking. A sample of 237 serious tournament contract bridg...

The main aim of this essay is to provide an approach to the analysis of the link between Thorstein Veblen’s evolutionary approach and Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT). Analysing this connection we expect to shed some light on the potential contribution of Veblen’s theory of socio-economic evolution to the discussion on the application of EGT to social environments. We also attempt to investigate ...

In this paper it is argued that evolutionary economics needs general statistical tools for performing the analysis of the aggregate effects of evolution in terms of the underlying population dynamics. These tools have been developed within biometrics, and they have recently become directly applicable to economic evolution due to the development of what may be called a general evometrics. Centra...

References [1] Cressman, R. (2003), Evolutionary Dynamics and Extensive Form Games, MIT Press. [2] van Damme, E. (1991), Stability and Perfection of Nash Equilibria, Springer. [Chapter 9] [3] Fudenberg, D. and D. K. Levine (1998), The Theory of Learning in Games, MIT Press. [4] Gintis, H. (2000), Game Theory Evolving, Princeton University Press. [5] Hammerstein, P. and R. Selten (1994), “Game T...

The authors develop the concept of regional systems of innovation and relate it to preexisting research on national systems of innovation. They argue that work conducted in the 'new regional science' field is complementary to systems of innovation approaches. They seek to link new regional work to evolutionary economics, and argue for the development of evolutionary regional science. Common ele...

USKALI MÄKI (Helsinki, 1951) is a philosopher of science and a social scientist, and one of the forerunners of the strong wave of research on the philosophy and methodology of economics that has been expanding during the last three decades. His research interests and academic contributions cover many topics in the philosophy of economics, such as realism and realisticness, idealisation, scienti...