Department of Economics

North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong (India)

 

ECO(O) 1012: EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS

 

Unit-I : Preliminaries of Evolutionary Economics                  12 Lectures

 

Arithmorphism vs Dialecticism; Mechanism vs organism; Newtonian vs Darwinian worldview; the biological methodology of complex interdependencies, competition, growth, and resource constraints

 

The concept of evolution- concepts of heredity, variation, mutation, recombination, natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow, adaptation, co-evolution, natural and artificial speciation

 

Lamarckism, Darwinism, Neo-Lamarckism  and Neo-Darwinism; Gene-centered viw of evolution; Modern evolutionary synthesis and its tenets; Social Darwinism

 

Theories of Phyletic gradualism versus Punctuated equilibrium; Chaos and emergence; Complex systems, complexity and self-organisation; Rudiments of Evolutionary Game theory and Evolutionarily stable strategy.

 

Unit-II : Major Contributors to Evalutionary Economics             11 Lectures

 

American Pragmatists; William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey and Clarence Ayers.

 

Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek, Kenneth Boulding and Nocholas Georgescu-Roegen.

 

Kenneth Arrow, Armen Alchian, Ronald Coase, Douglass North and ET Penrose

 

Herbert Simon, Robert Aumann, Ariel Rubinstein and Herbert Gintis.

 

Richard Nelson, Sidney Winter, Ulrich Witt and Philip Mirowski

Kurt Dopfer, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Hardi Hanappi

 

Unit-III : Models in Evolutionary Economics                              11 Lectures

 

Axiomatization of Evolutionary Economics; The concept and methodology of simulation; Structure of simulation models, Evolutionary modeling tools.

 

Agent-based models; Agent-based computational economics; Works of L Tesfatsion and KL  Judd.

 

Laboratory for Simulation Development (LSD) models of Andersen, Phylogenetic models.

 

Nelson-Winter Model : Logic, dynamics, software and empirical basis

 

Sugarscape model and Swarm multi-agent simulation of Santa Fe Institute

 

 

Unit-IV : Evolutionary Computation                                       11 Lectures

 

Evolutionary and Biologically-inspired methods; identification, classification and optimization

 

Genetic Algorithms – reproduction, recombination, selection, mutation and survival (fitness);

 

Particle Swarm and Differential Evolution optimization metaheuristics;

 

Elements of Artificial Neural Networks; methods of network architecture and training; backpropagation.

 

 

Reading Materials

 

Books

 

1.       Dopfer, Kurt & Potts, Jason  (2007) The General Theory of Economic Evolution, Routledge

2.       Foster, J & Metcalfe, JS [Eds.] (2001) Frontiers of Evolutionary Economics: Competition, Self-Organization and Innovation Policy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, USA (e-copy available)

3.       Tesfatsion, L & Judd, KL (2006) Handbook of Computational Economics, 2 vols Elsevier.

4.       Frank, Steven A. (1998) Foundations of Social Evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (e-copy available)

 

Research Papers (E-Copies of these papers are available)

Many more reading materials, especially on neural networks, agent-based computational economics and biologically inspired optimization techniques, including all books and research papers enlisted above, are downloadable from the website http://webng.com/economics

 

Course developed and reading materials searched/linked by

Professor SK Mishra

Dept. of Economics

North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong (India)

Contact : mishrasknehu@yahoo.com