Jacques Lesourne

Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.

Classical microeconomics is intended to explain how a price system is able to coordinate the economic agents. But even if it can be extended to incomplete information and externalities, it remains grounded on very heroic assumptions. Agents are endowed with a very strong rationality, equilibrium is stated without a concrete process to achieve it, market is the unique institution considered. Evolutionary microeconomics is aimed at bypassing these limitations by considering a dynamic approach, however not biologically oriented. Agents have local information and bounded rationality, they are involved in explicit processes of interactions through time, various institutions sustain the market or substitute to it. It explains then some phenomena hardly explained by classical microeconomics: dispersion of prices, variety of industrial structures, financial bubbles.

This book addresses some basic questions in economics, all of which have a common core - they all refer to forming behaviour, to the emergence of order, its adaptation, its transformation, and its ultimate dissolution into chaos. Starting with the notion of self-organization, the author analyses the operation and the demise of institutions in economics. In doing so, he takes into account the consequences of the intervention of history, chance, necessity, and will - a subject little undertaken in contemporary economic theory. Starting with the theory of microeconomics itself, the author builds precise models based on explicit hypotheses and draws out the significance of the propositions obtained. The book draws on systems theory, evolutionary theory, the literature on institutional economics, and existing general equilibrium theory, and steps outside the present conceptual framework of microeconomics.