Abstract
Over the past fifty years, the conceptual exchanges between evolutionary biology and economics have been greatly intensified. From these exchanges, three disciplines have emerged, namely: evolutionary game theory, evolutionary economics and evolutionary behavioral economics. In this postface, we propose a brief survey of these approaches, by focusing on the kind of explanatory schemes that they involve. We then conclude with a few thoughts relative to the future of the relations between economics and biology.
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Notes
- 1.
At the individual level, the phenotypic strategies are merely “implemented” by the organisms—in their genotypes—with no assumption being made about their cognitive capacities.
- 2.
This appellation is a bit unfortunate, for evolutionary economics has not much in common with the other “evolutionary” approaches in social sciences (like evolutionary psychology). But to follow the common use, we will stick with this appellation.
- 3.
In the most radical versions of this theory (e.g. Hodgson, 2002), economic competition is envisaged as an instance of natural selection (see Walliser, this volume).
- 4.
In Nelson and Winter’s view, the most successful routines tend to be copied by the other firms present on the same markets, based on their average success.
- 5.
Examples of such departures include violations of instrumental rationality, such as preferences reversal, time inconsistent preferences or loss aversion, but also violations of cognitive rationality, such as violation of Bayes’ rule and multiple statistical biases.
- 6.
This point does not rely on the nature of the situation considered—deterministic or stochastic.
- 7.
The most common examples are violations of transitivity or non-independence of irrelevant alternatives.
- 8.
The independence axiom stipulates that, if an agent prefers lottery A to lottery B, then for any lottery C and any probability p, the agent should prefer the compound lottery (A, p; C, 1 – p) to the compound lottery (B, p; C, 1 – p). In the Allais paradox, the agents prefer a lottery A with a sure monetary outcome to a lottery B with an unsure outcome (but with a higher expected utility), and yet reverse their preferences when confronted to a pair of compound lotteries D and E which are such that (i) both obtain, respectively, by mixing A and B with a lottery C in identical proportions (p; 1 – p), and where (ii) neither guarantees a sure monetary outcome.
- 9.
An example of idiosyncratic risk would be a situation where each individual of type B has an independent chance of being caught by a predator. By contrast, an example of aggregate risk would be a situation where all of the individuals of type B have the same chance of ending simultaneously with either the bad or the good outcome—e.g. an unexpected harsh winter after the foraging season (Starrfelt & Kokko, 2012) .
- 10.
On this latter point, see Kandasamy et al. (2014).
- 11.
In one sense, integrative explanations could be envisaged as a limit case of analogical explanations (like the “integral” analogies discussed by Walliser in his ‘Preliminary Reflections’, this volume), for they apply precisely when the explanandum of one discipline (in this case: economic behaviors) shares all of the relevant aspects—plus some, non-relevant aspects—of the explanandum of a broader discipline (biological behaviors).
- 12.
In the dictator game, an experimenter gives a subject a fixed amount of money; and the latter has to choose between (a) sharing this amount of money with an unrelated and anonymous recipient or (b) keeping the whole amount. In the ultimatum game, the experimental setting is identical, except that the recipient now has the possibility of declining the offer—which leads to a mutual payoff of zero. Typically, the agent shares about 25% of the initial endowment in the dictator game (altruistic cooperation) and about 40–50% of the initial endowment in the ultimatum game. Small offers in the ultimatum game are almost systematically rejected by the recipients (altruistic punishment).
- 13.
In both the dictator and the ultimatum games, classical game theory predicts that the agent should keep the whole amount of money. In the ultimatum game, it also predicts that the recipient should accept any offer, even the smallest.
- 14.
This is not, however, a conclusion that Hammerstein and Hagen (2005) endorse explicitly in their paper.
- 15.
Hammerstein and Hagen illustrate this lack of communication by pointing to the parallel development of signaling theory (see COMMUNICATION/SIGNALLING) in economics and evolutionary biology—as the authors note, evolutionary biologists didn’t seem to be aware, at first, that such a theory had already been developed by economists a few years earlier.
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Martens, J. (2022). Concluding Remarks 2: Economics and Evolutionary Biology: An Overview of Their (Recent) Interactions. In: From Evolutionary Biology to Economics and Back. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08790-5_5
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