The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics

Kurt Dopfer is Professor of Economics and co-director of the Institute of Economics at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

'The construction of an evolutionary economics is, in my view, one of the greatest scientific adventures of our time. This book brings together the leading scholars in the field to articulate what the evolutionary project in economics is all about, to provide a sense of its scope, and to lay the foundations for future research. The volume also extends a genuine invitation to participate in the exciting task of building an empirically grounded economic theory. The theoretical edifice of evolutionary economics is presently a work in progress, with some floors and some quarters much better worked out than others. But the vision of what it should look like at the end emerges clearly from this volume: it should be able to explain how modern economics came about through historically contingent processes and it should provide us with a deeper understanding of the economic challenges that lie ahead. I recommend leaving the introductory chapter for the end. Visit straight away the individual scholars' workshops, which are filled with many marvelous insights.' Johann Peter Murmann, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

• Prolegomenon; 1. Evolutionary economics: a theoretical framework Kurt Dopfer; Part I. Ontological Foundations: 2. The rediscovery of value and the opening of economics Ilya Prigogine; 3. Synergetics: from physics to economics Hermann Haken; 4. Darwinism, altruism and economics Herbert A. Simon; 5. Decomposition and growth: biological metaphors in economics from the 1880s to the 1980s Geoffrey M. Hodgson; 6. Path dependence in economic processes: implications for policy analysis in dynamical systems contexts Paul A. David; 7. Is there a theory of economic history? Joel Mokyr; Part II. Framework for Evolutionary Analysis: 8. Toward an evolutionary theory of production Sidney G. Winter; 9. Learning in evolutionary environments Giovanni Dosi, Luigi Marengo and Giorgio Fagiolo; 10. Evolutionary theory of the firm Ulrich Witt; 11. The self-organizational perspective on economic processes: a unifying paradigm John Foster; 12. Evolutionary concepts in relation to evolutionary economics J. Stanley Metcalfe; 13. Economics and the science of evolutionary complex systems Peter Allen; 14. Perspectives on technological evolution Richard R. Nelson; 15. Complex dynamics in economic organisms Ping Chen; 16. Evolutionary theorizing on economic growth Gerald Silverberg and Bart Verspagen; Bibliography; Index.