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Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years. One follows an older, rather neglected approach which emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions. The other emphasizes economies as complex adaptive systems. Important concepts from evolutionary theory include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene-culture coevolution. Relevant concepts from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. This work explores these two bodies of theory and their potential impact on economics

This book deals with the economy as a complex interactive system. The emphasis is on the direct interaction between agents rather than on the indirect and autonomous interaction through the market mechanism. Contributions from economists and physicists emphasise the consequences for aggregate behaviour of the interaction between agents with limited rationality. Models of financial markets which exhibit many of the stylised facts of empirical markets such as bubbles, herd behaviour and long memory are presented. This includes contributions on bargaining, buyer-seller relations, the evolution of economic networks and several aspects of macro-economic behaviour. This book will be of interest to all those interested in the foundations of collective social and economic behaviour and in particular, to those concerned with the dynamics of market behaviour and recent applications of physics to economics

Economics: Beyond the Millennium contains articles by leading authorities in various fields of economic theory and econometrics. Each contributor gives an account of the current state of the art in their own field and indicates the direction that they think it will take in the next ten years. The book is split into three sections: the microfoundations of macroeconomics, markets and organization, and econometrics, with highlights including Malinvaud onresource allocation, Van Damme on game theory, and Gourieroux on econometric modelling.