Spontaneous Order

These essays are fundamental contributions to the theory of the dynamics underlying the emergence of Social Norms. They are essential for anyone in the field.

Auteur
H. Peyton Young is James Meade Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He has published widely in economics, game theory, political representation, finance, and mathematics and is particularly well-known for his research on evolutionary game theory and its application to the evolution of social norms and institutions. He has also made notable contributions to the theory of distributive justice and its applications to political representation and the allocation of common resources. A Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, Peyton Young is also a former President of the Game Theory Society.

Résumé
Spontaneous Order brings together Peyton Young's research on evolutionary game theory and its diverse applications across a wide range of academic disciplines, including economics, sociology, philosophy, biology, computer science, and engineering. Enhanced with an introductory essay and commentaries, the book pulls together the author's work thematically to provide a valuable resource for scholars of economic theory. Young argues that equilibrium behaviors often coalesce from the interactions and experiences of many dispersed individuals acting with fragmentary knowledge of the world, rather than (as is often assumed in economics) from the actions of fully rational agents with commonly held beliefs. The author presents a unified and rigorous account of how such 'bottom-up' evolutionary processes work, using recent advances in stochastic dynamical systems theory. This analytical framework illuminates how social norms and institutions evolve, how social and technical innovations spread in society, and how these processes depend on adaptive learning behavior by human subjects.