Mechanisms of Endogenous Institutional Change

This paper proposes an analytical-cum-conceptual framework for understanding the nature of institutions as well as their changes. In doing so, it attempts to achieve two things: First, it proposes a way to reconcile an equilibrium (endogenous) view of institutions with the notion of agents’ bounded rationality by introducing such concepts as a summary representation of equilibrium as common knowledge of agents. Second, it specifies some generic mechanisms of institutional coherence and change -- overlapping social embededdness, Schumpeterian innovation in bundling games and dynamic institutional complementarities -- useful for understanding the dynamic interactions of economic, political, social and organizational factors.

Unnatural Selection: A new formal approach to punctuated equilibrium in economic systems

Generalized Darwinian evolutionary theory has emerged as central to the description of economic process (e.g., Aldrich et. al., 2008). Here we demonstrate that, just as Darwinian principles provide necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for understanding the dynamics of social entities, in a similar manner the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory provide another set of necessary conditions that constrain the evolution of socioeconomic process. These latter constraints can, however, easily be formulated as a statistics-like analytic toolbox for the study of empirical data that is consistent with a generalized Darwinism, and this is no small thing

The Penalty-Duel and Institutional Design: Is there a Neeskens-Effect?

nonesoccer, game theory, sports