Spontaneous Order How Norms, Institutions, and Innovations Emerge from the Bottom Up

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.

Part I: The Evolution of Norms and Institutions1. Spontaneous OrderPreface to Chatper 2: Evolutionary Dynamics with Persistent Perturbations2. The Evolution of ConventionsPreface to Chapter 3: The Spontaneous Emergence of Bargaining Norms3. An Evolutoinary Model of BargainingPreface to Chapter 4: Who Sets the Rules of the Game?4. Conventional ContractsPreface to Chapter 5: The Role of Custom in Setting Commissions, Fees, and Shares5. Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois AgriculturePart II: LearningPreface to Chapters 6-8: Learning to Play Without Knowing the Game6. On the Impossibility of Prediciting the Behavior of Ratoinal Agents7. Learning by Trial and Error8. Learning in a Black BoxPreface to Chapters 9-10: Spontaneous Order by Design9. Payoff-Based Dynamics in Multi-Player Weakly Acyclic Games10. Achieving Pareto-Optimality Through Distributed LearningPart III: The Diffusion of InnovationsPreface to Chapters 11-13: How Do New Ways of Doing Things Become Generally Accepted?11. Innovation Diffusion in Heterogeneous Populations: Contagion, Social Influence, and Social Learning12. The Dynamics of Social Innovation13. The Speed of Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks