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12 results in Cambridge Elements

Evolutionary Selection and Keynes–Schumpeter Macroeconomics

Evolutionary Selection and Keynes–Schumpeter Macroeconomics
  • Önder Nomaler, Danilo Spinola, Bart Verspagen
  • Published online:
    30 September 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025
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  • This Element develops a stock-flow consistent agent-based macroeconomic model with Schumpeterian and Keynesian characteristics. On the Schumpeterian side, technological change is modelled as productivity growth as a result of research and development (R&D). The R&D strategies of firms are determined by an evolutionary selection process. On the Keynesian side, demand is endogenous on current income and the stock of households' financial wealth. In the long run, an evolutionary stable R&D strategy of firms emerges, leading to endogenous productivity growth. Demand adjusts endogenously to match labour-saving productivity growth, so that the employment rate is stationary, although with business cycle fluctuations. The authors use Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the emergence of an evolutionary stable R&D strategy, as well as the long-run properties of the model and the nature of business cycles. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Institutional Acceleration

Institutional Acceleration
  • The Consequences of Technological Change in a Digital Economy
  • Darcy W. E. Allen, Chris Berg, Jason Potts
  • Published online:
    26 May 2025
    Print publication:
    29 May 2025
  • This Element develops a theory of institutional acceleration to explain the transformation to a digital economy through a cluster of frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing, cryptography, and low-earth orbit infrastructure. Unlike previous technological revolutions, these technologies transform not how we organise things, but how we coordinate economic activity. The authors' supertransition thesis explains why these digital technologies shouldn't be understood in isolation, but rather should be understood in how they combine to create new institutional possibilities, leading to more open, complex, and global economic systems. Drawing on evolutionary economics and institutional theory, this Element shows how this evolutionary process is reshaping our institutional economic architecture. Ultimately, institutional acceleration drives greater computation and knowledge into our economic systems.
Evolutionary Price Theory

Evolutionary Price Theory
  • Harry Bloch
  • Published online:
    05 May 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • Economic evolution involves structural change from within, so evolutionary price theory needs to address how prices facilitate and accommodate this structural change and how structural change in turn impacts on prices. Such analysis is impossible using neoclassical price theory in which endowments of inputs, production technology and consumer preferences are all treated as exogenously determined and the future is known or at least its probability distribution is known. An alternative theory of price determination outlined in this book is compatible with structural change from within and an unknown future. The theory employs an open-system ontology and a micro-meso-macro methodology. Prices have a dual informational role in evolutionary economics. As well as coordinating ongoing production and consumption activities, prices provide information to guide potential entrepreneurs and their financiers in evaluating the profitability of innovations. The latter role can substantially disrupt the order created in the former role.
Agent-based Macroeconomics

Agent-based Macroeconomics
  • The Schumpeter Meeting Keynes Models
  • Giovanni Dosi, Andrea Roventini
  • Published online:
    02 May 2025
    Print publication:
    29 May 2025
  • This Element is about agent-based macroeconomics in general, and in particular about a family of evolutionary, agent-based models (ABMs), which are called 'Schumpeter meeting Keynes' (or K+S). The K+S models knit together 'Schumpeterian' endogenous processes of innovation with 'Keynesian' mechanisms of demand generation. As with all well-constructed ABMs, the K+S models are populated by a multiplicity of agents which interact on the grounds of quite simple, empirically based, behavioural rules, whose collective outcomes are 'emergent properties' which cannot be imputed to the intention of any single agent. After the K+S model is empirically validated, the impacts of different combinations of innovation, industrial, fiscal, and monetary policies for different labour-market regimes and inequality scenarios are assessed. The Element offers a new perspective on macroeconomics considering the economy as a complex evolving system.
Entrepreneurship and Evolutionary Economics

Entrepreneurship and Evolutionary Economics
  • Per L. Bylund
  • Published online:
    04 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • Entrepreneurship has been expunged from contemporary mainstream economics despite being an important driver and cause of economic development and growth. However, whereas Evolutionary Economics recognizes value-creative entrepreneurship, its role and impact tend to still be understated and the vast implications not fully understood. This Element attempts to remedy this by theorizing on how entrepreneurship impacts and drives market economies, the implications for economic change and renewal, and how the pursuit of new value creation determines the evolution of an economy. We find that allowing for entrepreneurial new value creation – innovative entrepreneurship – produces a different and more dynamic understanding of the market as a process, the role of knowledge and uncertainty, economic evolution and progress, as well as has important implications for political economy.
The Dynamic Metacapabilities Framework

The Dynamic Metacapabilities Framework
  • Introducing Quantum Management and the Informational View of the Firm
  • Harold Paredes-Frigolett, Andreas Pyka
  • Published online:
    31 January 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • The view of dynamic capabilities in evolutionary economics as being based on capabilities comprised of routines has so far precluded their integration in evolutionary economics. This Element contributes to such integration by introducing the dynamic metacapabilities framework. Borrowing from quantum mechanics, dynamic metacapabilities assume that resources and capabilities, rather than being created ex-nihilo, result from bundles of information 'decohering ' to bundles of resources and capabilities as new information becomes available to the firm. Operationalized by a management paradigm we call 'quantum management, ' dynamic metacapabilities contribute to integrating dynamic capabilities in evolutionary economics and to resolving the ongoing debate on what dynamic capabilities are by postulating an informational view of the firm according to which firms 'evolve ' with strategy throughout a lifecycle governing the transition from dynamic 'metacapabilities ' to dynamic capabilities and onto ordinary capabilities.
Evolutionary Games and the Replicator Dynamics

Evolutionary Games and the Replicator Dynamics
  • Saul Mendoza-Palacios, Onésimo Hernández-Lerma
  • Published online:
    13 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element introduces the replicator dynamics for symmetric and asymmetric games where the strategy sets are metric spaces. Under this hypothesis the replicator dynamics evolves in a Banach space of finite signed measures. The authors provide a general framework to study the stability of the replicator dynamics for evolutionary games in this Banach space. This allows them to establish a relation between Nash equilibria and the stability of the replicator for normal a form games applicable to oligopoly models, theory of international trade, public good models, the tragedy of commons, and War of attrition game among others. They also provide conditions to approximate the replicator dynamics on a space of measures by means of a finite-dimensional dynamical system and a sequence of measure-valued Markov processes.
Explaining Technology

Explaining Technology
  • Roger Koppl, Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, Abigail Devereaux, Brian D. Fath, James Herriot, Wim Hordijk, Stuart Kauffman, Robert E. Ulanowicz, Sergi Valverde
  • Published online:
    09 August 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
  • A long tradition explains technological change as recombination. Within this tradition, this Element develops an innovative combinatorial model of technological change and tests it with 2,000 years of global GDP data and with data from US patents filed between 1835 and 2010. The model explains 1) the pace of technological change for a least the past two millennia, 2) patent citations and 3) the increasing complexity of tools over time. It shows that combining and modifying pre-existing goods to produce new goods generates the observed historical pattern of technological change. A long period of stasis was followed by sudden super-exponential growth in the number of goods. In this model, the sudden explosion of about 250 years ago is a combinatorial explosion that was a long time in coming, but inevitable once the process began at least two thousand years ago. This Element models the Industrial Revolution as a combinatorial explosion.
Industrial Policy

Industrial Policy
  • The Coevolution of Public and Private Sources of Finance for Important Emerging and Evolving Technologies
  • Kenneth I. Carlaw, Richard G. Lipsey
  • Published online:
    21 June 2022
    Print publication:
    14 July 2022
  • Dismissing industrial policy because 'governments cannot pick winners' is counter-productive. This Element studying selected major innovations illustrates the fact that virtually all major new technologies have been developed by a synergetic cooperation between the public and the private sectors, each doing what it can do best. By examining how R&D is financed, rather than where it takes place, the authors show that the role of the public sector is much more pronounced than is often thought. The nature of the cooperation − who does what − varies with the nature of each innovation so that simple, one-size-fits-all, rules about what each sector should do are suspect. These results are particularly important because they challenge the scepticism in the United states and elsewhere about the importance of industrial policy, a scepticism that threatens to undermine the long-term, and necessary cooperation, between the public and private sectors in promoting growth-inducing innovations.
Coevolution in Economic Systems

Coevolution in Economic Systems
  • Isabel Almudi, Francisco Fatas-Villafranca
  • Published online:
    12 May 2021
    Print publication:
    10 June 2021
  • Coevolution in economic systems plays a key role in the dynamics of contemporary societies. Coevolution operates when, considering several evolving realms within a socioeconomic system, these realms mutually shape their respective innovation, replication and/or selection processes. The processes that emerge from coevolution should be analyzed as being globally codetermined in dynamic terms. The notion of coevolution appears in the literature on modern innovation economics since the neo-Schumpeterian inception four decades ago. In this Element, these antecedents are drawn on to formally clarify and develop how the coevolution notion can expand the analytical and methodological scope of evolutionary economics, allowing for further unification and advance of evolutionary subfields.
Evolutionary Economics

Evolutionary Economics
  • Its Nature and Future
  • Geoffrey M. Hodgson
  • Published online:
    15 July 2019
    Print publication:
    17 October 2019
  • This Element examines the historical emergence of evolutionary economics, its development into a strong research theme after 1980, and how it has hosted a diverse set of approaches. Its focus on complexity, economic dynamics and bounded rationality is underlined. Its core ideas are compared with those of mainstream economics. But while evolutionary economics has inspired research in a number of areas in business studies and social science, these have become specialized and fragmented. Evolutionary economics lacks a sufficiently-developed core theory that might promote greater conversation across these fields. A possible unifying framework is generalized Darwinism. Stronger links could also be made with other areas of evolutionary research, such as with evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology. As evolutionary economics has migrated from departments of economics to business schools, institutes of innovation studies and elsewhere, it also needs to address the problem of its lack of a single disciplinary location within academia.
A Reconsideration of the Theory of Non-Linear Scale Effects

A Reconsideration of the Theory of Non-Linear Scale Effects
  • The Sources of Varying Returns to, and Economies of, Scale
  • Richard G. Lipsey
  • Published online:
    20 March 2018
    Print publication:
    22 March 2018
  • The main thrust of this Element is a critical assessment of the theory and evidence concerning the sources of scale effects. It is argued that the analysis of static scale effects is important because scale effects are embedding in our world, and new technologies associated with an evolving economy often allow their exploitation when they cannot be exploited in less technically advanced and smaller economies. So, although static equilibrium theory is not a good vehicle for studying economic growth, showing how scale effects operate when output varies with given technology helps us to understand the scale effects that occur when output rises as a result of economic growth, even though that is typically driven by technological change.