Spontaneous Order
How Norms, Institutions, and Innovations Emerge from the Bottom Up
Published on 19. September 2024
320 pages
978-0-19-889299-1 (ISBN)
Description
Spontaneous Order brings together Peyton Young's research on evolutionary game theory and its diverse applications across a wide range of academic disciplines, including economics, sociology, philosophy, biology, computer science, and engineering. Enhanced with an introductory essay and commentaries, the book pulls together the author's work thematically to provide a valuable resource for scholars of economic theory.
Young argues that equilibrium behaviors often coalesce from the interactions and experiences of many dispersed individuals acting with fragmentary knowledge of the world, rather than (as is often assumed in economics) from the actions of fully rational agents with commonly held beliefs. The author presents a unified and rigorous account of how such 'bottom-up' evolutionary processes work, using recent advances in stochastic dynamical systems theory. This analytical framework illuminates how social norms and institutions evolve, how social and technical innovations spread in society, and how these processes depend on adaptive learning behavior by human subjects.
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Book
10/2024
Oxford University Press
€156.50
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Person
H. Peyton Young is James Meade Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He has published widely in economics, game theory, political representation, finance, and mathematics and is particularly well-known for his research on evolutionary game theory and its application to the evolution of social norms and institutions. He has also made notable contributions to the theory of distributive justice and its applications to political representation and the allocation of common resources. A Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, Peyton Young is also a former President of the Game Theory Society.
Content
- Part I: The Evolution of Norms and Institutions
- 1: Spontaneous Order
- Preface to Chapter 2: Evolutionary Dynamics with Persistent Perturbations
- 2: The Evolution of Conventions
- Preface to Chapter 3: The Spontaneous Emergence of Bargaining Norms
- 3: An Evolutionary Model of Bargaining
- Preface to Chapter 4: Who Sets the Rules of the Game?
- 4: Conventional Contracts
- Preface to Chapter 5: The Role of Custom in Setting Commissions, Fees, and Shares
- 5: Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture
- Part II: Learning
- Preface to Chapters 6-8: Learning to Play Without Knowing the Game
- 6: On the Impossibility of Predicting the Behavior of Rational Agents
- 7: Learning by Trial and Error
- 8: Learning in a Black Box
- Preface to Chapters 9-10: Spontaneous Order by Design
- 9: Payoff-Based Dynamics in Multi-Player Weakly Acyclic Games
- 10: Achieving Pareto-Optimality Through Distributed Learning
- Part III: The Diffusion of Innovations
- Preface to Chapters 11-13: How Do New Ways of Doing Things Become Generally Accepted?
- 11: Innovation Diffusion in Heterogeneous Populations: Contagion, Social Influence, and Social Learning
- 12: The Dynamics of Social Innovation
- 13: The Speed of Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks
