Economic Coordination and Dynamics: Some Elements of an Alternative "Evolutionary" Paradigm

The paper, largely based on the introduction to Dosi (2012), elaborates on the main interpretative ingredients, methodology and challenges ahead of the evolutionary research program in economics. Telegraphically, such a perspective attempts to understand a wide set of economic phenomena - ranging from microeconomic behaviours to the features of industrial structures and dynamics, all the way to the properties of aggregate growth and development - as outcomes of far-from-equilibrium interactions among heterogeneous agents, characterized by endogenous preferences, most often "boundedly rational" but always capable of learning, adapting and innovating with respect to their understandings of the world in which they operate, the technologies they master, their organizational forms and their behavioural repertoires. And on methodological grounds, far from disdaining formal modelling and statistical analysis, the research program is, however, largely inductive, taking very seriously indeed empirical regularities at all levels of observation as discipline for the modelling assumptions. Together, the paper places such interpretative perspective against some fundamental questions addressed by the economic discipline in general and against the answers to such questions that contemporary theory has to offer. Such questions fundamentally concern first, the drivers of dynamics and, second, the conditions of coordination among interacting agents.