Download or read book Elements of an Evolutionary Theory of Welfare written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elements of an Evolutionary Theory of Welfare written by Martin Binder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has always been an important task of economics to assess individual and social welfare. The traditional approach has assumed that the measuring rod for welfare is the satisfaction of the individual’s given and unchanging preferences, but recent work in behavioural economics has called this into question by pointing out the inconsistencies and context-dependencies of human behaviour. When preferences are no longer consistent, we have to ask whether a different measure for individual welfare can, and should, be found. This book goes beyond the level of preference and instead considers whether a hedonistic view of welfare represents a viable alternative, and what its normative implications are. Offering a welfare theory with stronger behavioural and evolutionary foundations, Binder follows a naturalistic methodology to examine the foundations of welfare, connecting the concept with a dynamic theory of preference learning, and providing a more realistic account of human behaviour. This book will be of interest to researchers and those working in the fields of welfare economics, behavioural and evolutionary economics.
Download or read book Elements of an Evolutionary Theory of Welfare Assessing Welfare when Preference Change written by Martin Binder and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Evolutionary Approach to Social Welfare written by Christian Sartorius and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autonomy of individuals their view of the world in the past, had led to the problem that socially acceptable decisions could not be made in the absence of unanimity. This book addresses this shortcoming.
Download or read book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change written by Richard R. Nelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985-10-15 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium. The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.
Download or read book Evolutionary Governance Theory written by Raoul Beunen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents empirical studies and theoretical reflections on Evolutionary Governance Theory (EGT), its most important concepts and their interrelations. As a novel theory of governance, EGT understands governance as radically evolutionary, which implies that all elements of governance are subject to evolution, that these elements co-evolve and that many of them are the product of governance itself. Through this book we learn how communities understand themselves and their environment and why they create the complex structures and processes we analyze as governance paths. Authors from different disciplines develop the EGT framework further and apply it to a wide rage networks of power, governance of agricultural resources etc. The contributors also reflect on the possibilities and limitations of steering, intervention, management and development in a world continuously in flux. It bridges the gap between more fundamental and philosophical accounts of the social sciences and applied studies, offering theoretical advancements as well as practical recommendations.
Download or read book Human Evolution Beyond Biology and Culture written by Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete account of evolutionary thought in the social, environmental and policy sciences, creating bridges with biology.
Download or read book The Foundations of Evolutionary Institutional Economics written by Manuel Scholz-Wackerle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generic institutionalism offers a new perspective on institutional economic change within an evolutionary framework. The institutional landscape shapes the social fabric and economic organization in manifold ways. The book elaborates on the ubiquity of such institutional forms with regards to their emergence, durability and exit in social agency-structure relations. Thereby institutions are considered as social learning environments changing the knowledge base of the economy along generic rule-sets in non-nomological ways from within. Specific attention is given to a theoretical structuring of the topic in ontology, heuristics and methodology. Part I introduces a generic naturalistic ontology by comparing prevalent ontological claims in evolutionary economics and preparing them for a broader pluralist and interdisciplinary discourse. Part II reconsiders these ontological claims and confronts it with prevalent heuristics, conceptualizations and projections of institutional change. In this respect the book revisits the institutional economic thought of Thorstein Veblen, Friedrich August von Hayek, Joseph Alois Schumpeter and Pierre Bourdieu. A synthesis is suggested in an application of the generic rule-based approach. Part III discusses the implementation of rule-based bottom-up models of institutional change and provides a basic prototype agent-based computational simulation. The evolution of power relations plays an important role in the programming of real-life communication networks. This notion characterizes the discussed policy realms (Part IV) of ecological and financial sustainability as tremendously complex areas of institutional change in political economy, leading to the concluding topic of democracy in practice. The novelty of this approach is given by its modular theoretical structure. It turns out that institutional change is carried substantially by affective social orders in contrast to rational orders as communicated in orthodox economic realms. The characteristics of affective orders are derived theoretically from intersections between ontology and heuristics, where interdependencies between instinct, cognition, rationality, reason, social practice, habit, routine or disposition are essential for the embodiment of knowledge. This kind of research indicates new generic directions to study social learning in particular and institutional evolution in general.
Download or read book Individual Strategy and Social Structure written by H. Peyton Young and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoclassical economics as-sumes that people are highly rational and can reason their way through even the most complex economic problems. In Individual Strategy and Social Structure, Peyton Young argues for a more realistic view in which people have a limited understanding of their environment, are sometimes short-sighted, and occasionally act in perverse ways. He shows how the cumulative experiences of many such individuals coalesce over time into customs, norms, and institutions that govern economic and social life. He develops a theory that predicts how such institutions evolve and characterizes their welfare properties. The ideas are illustrated through a variety of examples, including patterns of residential segregation, rules of the road, claims on property, forms of economic contracts, and norms of equity. The book relies on new results in evolutionary game theory and stochastic dynamical systems theory, many of them originated by the author. It can serve as an introductory text, or be read on its own as a contribution to the study of economic and social institutions.
Download or read book Frontiers in Evolutionary Economics written by Uwe Cantner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Psychological Calculus for Welfare Tradeoffs written by Andrew Wyatt Delton and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Members of social species routinely make decisions that involve welfare allocations--decisions that impact the welfare of two or more parties. These decisions often involve welfare tradeoffs such that increasing one organism's welfare comes at the expense of another organisms' welfare. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to understand how the human mind makes these tradeoffs. First, I review a number of theories from evolutionary biology that predict how and why welfare tradeoffs should be made. Collectively, these theories predict that organisms must make estimates of a number of features about themselves and others (for instance, degree of relatedness and quality as a reciprocation partner). To make effective welfare tradeoffs, however, these estimates must combined into a summary variable--a welfare tradeoff ratio--that is used to regulate social decision-making. By consulting this variable, an organism can determine when it is and is not appropriate to cede personal welfare on behalf of another. Second, I provide experimental, cross-national evidence that welfare tradeoff ratios exist and regulate social decision-making in surprisingly precise ways. Demonstrating this requires developing a new quantitative measurement device and methods to analyze the resulting data. Third, in further experiments I show that the mind can also estimate welfare tradeoff ratios stored in the minds of others. Finally, I review the connections between welfare tradeoff theory and other approaches to social decision-making. The discovery of this neurocomputational element helps to explain how complex behaviors--such as cooperation, generosity, and aggression--can arise from a physical device such as the human brain.
Download or read book Demand Complexity and Long Run Economic Evolution written by Andreas Chai and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-11 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this contributed volume is to consider how global consumption patterns will develop in the next few decades, and what the consequences of that development will be for the economy, policymakers, and society at large. In the long run, the extent to which economic growth translates into better living conditions strongly depends on how rising affluence and new technologies shape consumer preferences. The ongoing rise in household income in developing countries raises some important questions: Will consumption patterns always continue to expand in the same manner as we have witnessed in the previous two centuries? If not, how might things evolve differently? And what implications would such changes hold for not only our understanding of consumption behavior but also our pursuit of more sustainable societies?
Download or read book From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities written by Geoffrey M. Hodgson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are humans at their core seekers of their own pleasure or cooperative members of society? Paradoxically, they are both. Pleasure-seeking can take place only within the context of what works within a defined community, and central to any community are the evolved codes and principles guiding appropriate behavior, or morality. The complex interaction of morality and self-interest is at the heart of Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s approach to evolutionary economics, which is designed to bring about a better understanding of human behavior. In From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, Hodgson casts a critical eye on neoclassical individualism, its foundations and flaws, and turns to recent insights from research on the evolutionary bases of human behavior. He focuses his attention on the evolution of morality, its meaning, why it came about, and how it influences human attitudes and behavior. This more nuanced understanding sets the stage for a fascinating investigation of its implications on a range of pressing issues drawn from diverse environments, including the business world and crucial policy realms like health care and ecology. This book provides a valuable complement to Hodgson’s earlier work with Thorbjørn Knudsen on evolutionary economics in Darwin’s Conjecture, extending the evolutionary outlook to include moral and policy-related issues.
Download or read book The Two Sides of Innovation written by Guido Buenstorf and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is devoted to innovation with a special focus on its two sides, namely creation and destruction, and on its role in the evolution of capitalist economies. The first part of the book looks at innovation and its effects on economic performance, addressing issues of motives, behavioral rules under uncertainty, actor properties, and technology characteristics. The second part concentrates on potential consequences of innovative activities, in particular structural change, the “innovation-mediated” effect of skill-oriented policies on regional performance, the destructive effects of innovation activities, and the question whether novelty is always good. The role of innovation in the evolution of capitalism itself is discussed in the third part.
Download or read book The Social Evolution of Human Nature written by Harry Smit and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harry Smit examines the elements of current evolutionary theory and how they bear on the evolution of the human mind.
Download or read book Understanding Economic Change written by Ulrich Witt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how thinking in evolutionary terms enhances our understanding of the economic and social change taking place at all levels.
Download or read book Does Altruism Exist written by David Sloan Wilson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that altruism is an inherent factor of group functionality and discusses how studying group function can promote positive changes to the human condition.
