Wolfram Elsner

University of Bremen | Uni Bremen · Faculty of Business Studies and Economics Department of Economics

The “meso” level of a socio-economy, logically located between “micro” and “macro”, but in fact a theoretical tier on its own, has been neglected in mainstream economics. However, in the tradition of evolutionary-institutional and complexity economics, it has been theorized, focusing on informal institutions emerging as “structures” from collective...

The "meso" level of a socio-economy, logically located between "micro" and "macro", but in fact a theoretical tier on its own, has been neglected in mainstream economics. However, in the tradition of evolutionary-institutional and complexity economics, it has been theorized, focusing on informal-institutions emerging as "structures" from collective...

We highlight a number of examples of complex thinking from ancient times to the current edge. We refer the earlier complexity perspectives to the cutting-edge understanding of complex adaptive (economic) systems. This illustrates that simplistic (neoclassical) equilibrium thinking is a big exemption rather than the 'normal' in HET. Since the 1980s,...

This paper links late Neoliberal Financialized Capitalism (NFC) with biopolitics, identity crises, and emerging death cults. It is argued that late NFC entails spreading violence in state and society, increasing premature and violent deaths in growing subcultures. Individualistic ideologies-which lower social strata now embrace as enabling myths-su...

This paper links late Neoliberal Financialized Capitalism (NFC) with biopolitics, identity crises, and emerging death cults. It is argued that late NFC entails spreading violence in state and society, increasing premature and violent deaths in growing subcultures. Individualistic ideologies-which lower social strata now embrace as enabling myths-su...

Complexity Economics Microeconomics Game Theory Evolutionary Economics Institutional Economics Meso-Economics

This chapter investigates the relationship between information and innovation in a complexity-economics and namely evolutionary-institutional perspective. Rather than being some trivial change "towards the better," "innovative" change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) may be completely blocked or emerging too slowly or fragile and prone to repeated...

We highlight a number of examples of complex thinking from ancient times to the current edge. We refer the earlier complexity perspectives to the cutting-edge understanding of complex adaptive (economic) systems. This illustrates that simplistic (neoclassical) equilibrium thinking is a big exemption rather than the "normal" in HET. Since the 1980s,...

Despite cumulating crises, the neoliberal "market" doctrine advances largely uncontestably. In this context, we investigate a regressive institutional change, with an unprecedented increase of ceremonial values and warrant of behavior, or what Veblen had coined, "the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture." We draft a theoretical fr...

The aim of the paper is twofold: 1. to examine the identities and differences of the Chinese model of the developmental and entrepreneurial state ‘with Chinese characteristics’ with the general East Asian developmental state model, and 2. to derive some perspectives for the future of the particular Chinese model of the developmental state. The pape...

We study the functioning of informal value transfer systems through the example of Hawala. By complementing the institutional theory with computational experiments that use the first agent-based model of IVTS, we examine the roles of generalized trust and social control for the emergence, stability, and efficiency of Hawala. We show that both trust...

Decline and break-up of institutionalized cooperation, at all levels, has occurred frequently. Some of its concomitants, such as international migration, have become topical in the globalized world. Aspects of the phenomenon have also become known as failing states. However, the focus in most social sciences has been on institutional emergence and...

Teaching economics in a new age of differentiation, diversification, and heterodoxies.

Collapse is considered a breakup of institutions and entire socio-economies. Collapse has accompanied socio-economic history, but seems to have become more topical again in recent decades. We even face the danger of extinction of the human species, due to anthropocenic climate change, not the least based on failure of institutional arrangements. Up...

The aim of the paper is twofold: 1. to examine the identities and differences of the Chinese model of the developmental and entrepreneurial state ‘with Chinese characteristics’ with the general East Asian developmental state model, and 2. to derive some perspectives for the future of the particular Chinese model of the developmental state. The pape...

Globalization, De-Globalization, Re-Globalization, Global Value-Added Chains, USA, China, Corona, Covid-19 Pandemic, Diversification, Sustainability, Regionalization

Emergence and growth, or deterioration, of general trust, endogenously depend on socio-economic transformations. This paper attempts to explain a shrinking general trust in China, against the background of its ‘reform-opening up’ phase, by means of repeated prisoners’ dilemma games on networks. We find that the more anonymous large-scale interactio...

Spontaneous emergence of institutionalized cooperation in ubiquitous social dilemmas still is a field of highest relevance in behavioral and organizational economic research. In contrast to the theoretical prediction of defective behavior, manifold forms and degrees of cooperation exist in reality. We explain the emergence of general cooperation, e...

The UNDP HDR 2019 has called for "a revolution in metrics" to develop new ways to measure emerging forms of inequality. However, we do not only need better measurement, but also deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind inequality. Mainstream economists have long studied inequality, but much of that work focuses on narrowly conceived market mec...

We currently are in one of those rare historical phases, where we can "feel" and "experience" history nearly on a daily basis. Global constellations are changing rapidly and often surprisingly, and no one saw "it" coming, let alone being able to exactly forecast the current changes. A historical "phase transition" of the complex global system, in w...

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The present article models the critical factors for a successful and evolutionarily stable National System of Innovation. We simulate a model, against the background of increasingly complex technologies, in a national process of agents’ interactions with social-dilemma characteristics. In particular, the articleinvestigates the emergence of a trila...

Das nicht-komplexe und daher simplistische Modell einer perfekten Marktwirtschaft in einem einzigen determinierten Gleichgewicht ist weitgehend unbrauchbar und forscherisch unergiebig. Es kann endogene Krisen nicht systematisch erfassen, besitzt wenig praktische Verwertungsmöglichkeiten und findet in den verschiedensten Praxisbereichen daher auch k...

In line with this year's conference theme, the RA [JAES] & RA [M] joint sessions focus on our world of walled economies from an evolutionary-institutionalist and social economics perspective. A debate on "walls" has risen especially since 2015 when millions of people have been displaced due to war and instabilities in their home countries. Some Eur...

Dieser Beitrag stellt die Grundzüge der sog. Originären Institutionellen Ökonomik (OIE), in Abgrenzung zum neoklassischen „Mainstream“ und seiner Neuen Institutionellen Ökonomik (NIE), dar. Neben den Unterschieden zum „Mainstream“ fokussiert der Beitrag auf theoriegeschichtliche Wurzeln dieses auch „Amerikanischer Institutionalismus“ genannten Para...

Mainstream economics and everyday consciousness tend to declare any change an “innovation”. Innovation thus appears as a black box. It seems to lack a criterion to distinguish a counterproductive change – e.g., a dynamic perceived by agents as over-turbulence, or some flawed, misled, and futile “change” under fundamental uncertainty and opacity – f...

Mainstream economics and everyday consciousness tend to declare any change an "innovation". Innovation thus appears as a black box. It seems to lack a criterion to distinguish a counterproductive, even destructive change-e.g., a dynamic perceived by agents as over-turbulence, or some flawed, misled, and futile "change" under fundamental uncertainty...

Mainstream economics and everyday consciousness tend to declare any change an "innovation". Innovation thus appears as a black box. It seems to lack a criterion to distinguish a counterproductive change-e.g., a dynamic perceived by agents as over-turbulence, or some flawed, misled, and futile "change" under fundamental uncertainty and opacity-from...

(no abstract)

This article illustrates the usefulness of computational methods for the investigation of institutions. As an example, we use a computational agent-based model to study the role of general trust and social control in informal value transfer systems (IVTS). We find that the terms of interaction between general trust and social control have an impact...

Complexity economics has quickly become a powerful research program for real-world economics in recent years. This article provides an overview of complexity economics, and argues that it is incompatible with the “equilibrium” and “optimality” conceptions of the mainstream and its “market economy.” Instead, it develops older heterodox — including e...

The Theory of Institutional Change as elaborated by Paul D. Bush (1983, 1987) in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, Clarence Ayres, and John F. Foster (“VAFB paradigm”) provided a central device for institutional analysis, both theoretical and empirical, with its clarification of the value bases and of different forms and dynamics of behaviors and...

We study the functioning of informal value transfer systems (IVTS) through the example of Hawala. More precisely, using computational experiments we examine the roles of generalized trust and social control for the emergence, stability and efficiency of Hawala. Previous literature was ambiguous with regard to: (i) how trust and control should be op...

This paper attempts to explain the considerably declining level of general trust in China in recent years. It finds that the increases of average both interaction scope and spatial distance of interactions in the course of the major socioeconomic transformations in China may explain that decline of trust and of resulting cooperation levels. This, i...

Complexity economics has developed into a powerful empirical, theoretical, and computational research program in the last three decades, advancing more realistic economics. It converges with long-standing heterodox schools, and its theoretical and empirical findings are consistent with older heterodox research interests and predictions. Economic co...

We explain archaeological evidence of Sogdian merchants in central Asia in early medieval, remote long-distance trade on the emerging Silk Road. In fact, it began as barter, but was based on the social organization that Sogdians developed in their communities when migrating east. Their particular way of generating trust and institutionalized cooper...

(abstract available in german only)

We argue that economics must, and can, be taught in fundamentally different ways than the simplistic and ideology-laden " economics of x ". We illustrate this with a fundamentally new textbook, " Microeconomics of Complex Economies " (2015). The mainstream's ambivalence between some relevant research and its simplistic teaching in terms of " optimu...

review article of three leading microeconomic textbooks (Varian, Pindyck/Rubinfeld, Schumann/Meyer/Stroebele).

The increasing complexity of the environment of firms seems to have outgrown the traditional Coase-Williamson transaction-cost framework with its market-hierarchy dichotomy. We propose to integrate an institutional dimension to enhance the theory of the firm and the analysis of real-world organisational forms. This institutional dimension is concep...

For a short overview over the history of simulation, see Goldman et al. (2009).

This chapter explains the relevance and value of dealing in systematic ways with the history of economic thought (HET) in order to improve the explanatory power and problem-solving capacity of contemporary and future economic science. The chapter demonstrates the complexity dimension that always was virulent in the HET, starting from the beginnings...

The chapter gives an overview over recent advances and influential models in evolutionary, institutional, and complexity economics. Some earlier models built on game-theory foundations are presented, starting with A. Sen’s isolation paradox and assurance game, followed by A. Schotter’s, R. Axelrod’s, and K. Lindgren’s approaches to institutional em...

Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Matthias Greiff has contributed to this chapter.

This chapter addresses the question how the different methods presented in the preceding chapters, such as simulation, complexity, game theory, and evolutionary game theory relate together. Formal definitions of complexity and emergence are introduced alongside with a short overview over the history of these concepts. A number of related terms incl...

In this chapter, we introduce a number of complementary applied concepts focusing on environments for a successful innovation performance. These concepts share a view on the firm as embedded in network structures and on innovation as the outcome of processes that are open-ended, ongoing, and path dependent, or subject to feedback loops and circular...

Aaron Swartz’s A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work (2013/2009), Morgan & Claypool, p. 28.

Note that the canonical hawk-dove game awards the agents negative payoffs in the hawk-hawk strategy combination (the lower right field). However, adding the same base payoff to the payoffs of all agents in any possible outcome (strategy combination) does not change the structure and properties of the game. Here, we use this and add a base payoff eq...

This chapter was coauthored by Claudius Gräbner.

Against the background of the earlier real-world economies chapter (Chapter 4), with its coordination and dilemma problems involved in the value-added chains and in the choice of network technologies, this chapter further explains the basic tendency of nonregulated markets toward an oligopolistic market structure and a subsequent basic indeterminac...

Then President of the American Economic Association, Presidential Address: “Rigor and Relevance in a Changing Institutional Setting,” The American Economic Review, 66.1 (1976), pp. 1–14, p. 11.

Claudius Gräbner has contributed some sections to this chapter.

This chapter was coauthored by Claudius Gräbner.

This chapter was coauthored by Claudius Gräbner.

Complexity economics has developed into a promising cutting-edge research program for a more realistic economics in the last three or four decades. Also some convergent micro-and macro-foundations across heterodox schools have been attained with it. With some time lag, boosted by the financial crisis 2008ff., a surge to explore economic complexity'...

The increasing complexity of the environment of firms, of strategic interaction, and emergent informal institutional network cooperation, seems to outreach the traditional Coase-Williamson transaction-cost framework with its market-hierarchy dichotomy. We propose to take the complexity of nowadays’ firm ecologies more serious and integrate an insti...

We identify and elaborate some critical factors and mechanisms that foster the emergence of cooperative behavioral patterns. Through institutionalization, which solves social dilemmas through habituation, these factors and mechanisms provide the foundation of contingent cooperation and contextual trust in specific interaction ‘arenas’ and ‘meso’-si...

This chapter presents the core of neoclassical economic theory, the polypolistic competition model. The calculation of optimal consumer decisions is explained, as is the optimal calculation for companies. Partial market equilibrium and general equilibrium conditions are shown. The conditions for the general equilibrium to exist as a unique and stab...

Der Beitrag untersucht wichtige theoretische und methodologische Elemente, die in Abgrenzung zum neoklassischen „Mainstream“ der Ökonomik konstitutiv sind für eine moderne Sozioökonomie. Dabei wird die Ökonomik zunächst als praktisch einzige moderne Wissenschaft beschrieben, die dauerhaft paradigmatisch gespalten und umkämpft ist zwischen einem Mai...

Nicht nur die anhaltenden wirtschaftlichen Krisen verschaffen der traditionsreichen Sozioökonomie neue Aufmerksamkeit. Als integratives, meta-disziplinäres Paradigma verspricht sie ein besseres Verständnis wirtschaftlicher Phänomene und Zusammenhänge als monodisziplinäre Zugänge. Das Buch bietet erstmals einen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der...

Classical economists from Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus and to Karl Marx have considered the importance of direct interdependence and direct interactions for the economy. This was even more the case for original institutionalist thinkers such as Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and Clarence Ayres. In their writings, direct interdependence, interactio...

This paper discusses theoretical and methodological elements that constitute social economics. It also considers those elements for evolutionary (Veblenian) institutional economics. It investigates how these “heterodoxies” may further converge. Such convergence would probably not trigger a complete unification, but lead to a broadly defined common...

The Microeconomics of Complex Economies uses game theory, modeling approaches, formal techniques, and computer simulations to teach useful, accessible approaches to real modern economies. It covers topics of information and innovation, including national and regional systems of innovation; clustered and networked firms; and open-source/open-innovat...

This keynote reflects on the phased-out original neoclassical research program and the dominance of originally heterodox issues and questions, all beyond the ‘optimality and equilibrium of the market economy’, in modern cutting-edge economic research. This provides opportunities for heterodoxies and a number of severe internal consistency problems...