Evolution and Economic Complexity
J. Stanley Metcalfe and John Foster
© J. Stanley Metcalfe and John Foster, 2004
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J. Stanley Metcalfe
Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy and Cobden Lecturer and Co-Director, ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, University of Manchester, UK
and
John Foster
Professor of Economics and Head of the School of Economics,University of Queensland, Australia
Contents
List of contributors vii
Introduction and overview ix
PART I THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
1 Evolutionary foundations of economics 3
Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts
2 On the methodology of assessing agent-based evolutionary odels in the social sciences 24
Paul Ormerod and Bridget Rosewell
3 What do firms learn? Capabilities, distribution and the division of labour 38
Paolo Ramazzotti
4 Dynamic capabilities, tacit knowledge and absorption 62
Peter Hall
PART II MODELLING COMPLEXITY
5 The complexity of structure, strategy and decision making 85
Peter M. Allen
6 Knowledges, specialization and economic evolution: modelling the evolving division of human time 108
Esben Sloth Andersen
PART III EMPIRICAL PERSPECTIVES
7 Erring to be right: the paradox of error in the foundation of probability in economics 151
Francisco Louçã
8 Technological and economic mobility in large German manufacturing firms 172
Uwe Cantner and Jens J. Krüger
9 A conceptual framework to model long-run qualitative change in the energy system 191
Andreas Pyka, Bernd Ebersberger and Horst Hanusch
Index 215