Written in an informal way, this book is addressed to philosophers or cognitive scientists curious of how economics deals with cognition and to graduate students in economics eager to discover how economics evolves. It aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit with the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions.

Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.

Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the major key concepts common to economics and evolutionary biology. Written by a group of philosophers of science, biologists and economists, it proposes analyses of the meaning of twenty-five concepts from the viewpoint respectively of economics and of evolutionary biology -each followed by a short synthesis emphasizing major discrepancies and commonalities. This analysis is surrounded by chapters exploring the nature of the analogy that connects evolution and economics, and chapters that summarize the major teachings of the analyses of the keywords. Most scholars in biology and in economics know that their science has something in common with the other one, for instance the notions of competition and resources. Textbooks regularly acknowledge that the two fields share some history - Darwin borrowing from Malthus the insistence on scarcity of resources, and then behavioral ecologists adapting and transforming game theory into evolutionary game theory in the 1980s, while Friedman famously alluded to a Darwinian process yielding the extant firms. However, the real extent of the similarities, the reasons why they are so close, and the limits and even the nature of the analogy connecting economics and biological evolution, remain inexplicit. This book proposes basis analyses that can sustain such explication. It is intended for researchers, grad students and master students in evolutionary and in economics, as well as in philosophy of science.

In this book, cognitive economics is understood either in a broad sense as the influence exerted by some achievements of cognitive science on economics, or in a more restricted sense as the study of mental and adaptation processes implemented by economic agents in their interactions. In response to some critics addressed to the rationality and equilibrium principles in classical economics, cognitive economics associates an epistemic program grounded on individual beliefs and reasoning and an evolutionist program concerned with learning processes in a social context. The book, which is the result of the first Conference about Cognitive Economics held in Europe, gives an overview of various recent achievements of cognitive economics and is intended to better define its motivations and its boundaries. The proposed articles deal with the individual deliberation process of a single decision-maker, the conjoint learning process of several players in a game, the coordination of heterogenous economic agents through beliefs as well as with applications to entrepreneurial behavior, consumer interactions or knowledge economics. These articles also illustrate the different tools and methods which are currently used in the domain and enlarge those traditionally used in economics, from analytical work to model simulations, from conceptual work to laboratory experiments.
*Contributions to Economic Analysis was established in 1952
*The series purpose is to stimulate the international exchange of scientific information
*The series includes books from all areas of macroeconomics and microeconomics

Written in an informal way, this book is addressed to philosophers or cognitive scientists curious of how economics deals with cognition and to graduate students in economics eager to discover how economics evolves. It aims at extending the framework of game theory in order to better fit with the results of rapidly increasing laboratory experiments concerned with individual choices and collective interactions.