Spontaneous Order

H. Peyton Young is James Meade Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He has published widely in economics, game theory, political representation, finance, and mathematics and is particularly well-known for his research on evolutionary game theory and its application to the evolution of social norms and institutions. He has also made notable contributions to the theory of distributive justice and its applications to political representation and the allocation of common resources. A Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, Peyton Young is also a former President of the Game Theory Society.

This volume weaves the author's papers together, with new commentary and perspective, into a coherent whole that well exceeds the sum of its parts. The relevant audience is broad, as is the range of questions and techniques that appear in the volume. This is must reading, from a pioneer and leading contributor to the field, for anyone interested in the emergence of cooperation, social norms, and institutions.

• Part I: The Evolution of Norms and Institutions 1: Spontaneous Order Preface to Chapter 2: Evolutionary Dynamics with Persistent Perturbations 2: The Evolution of Conventions Preface to Chapter 3: The Spontaneous Emergence of Bargaining Norms 3: An Evolutionary Model of Bargaining Preface to Chapter 4: Who Sets the Rules of the Game? 4: Conventional Contracts Preface to Chapter 5: The Role of Custom in Setting Commissions, Fees, and Shares 5: Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture Part II: Learning Preface to Chapters 6-8: Learning to Play Without Knowing the Game 6: On the Impossibility of Predicting the Behavior of Rational Agents 7: Learning by Trial and Error 8: Learning in a Black Box Preface to Chapters 9-10: Spontaneous Order by Design 9: Payoff-Based Dynamics in Multi-Player Weakly Acyclic Games 10: Achieving Pareto-Optimality Through Distributed Learning Part III: The Diffusion of Innovations Preface to Chapters 11-13: How Do New Ways of Doing Things Become Generally Accepted? 11: Innovation Diffusion in Heterogeneous Populations: Contagion, Social Influence, and Social Learning 12: The Dynamics of Social Innovation 13: The Speed of Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks