Econobiology: What can economics learn from biology?

Jun 27, 2021
Left: A forest in Sorapiss, Dolomites, Italy. Right: New York City, USA.

The fields of Evolutionary Biology and Economics have mutually exchanged ideas that lead to breakthrough for the past two centuries, starting with Darwin who got inspired from the economist Malthus for developing his theory on Evolution. Indeed, it is more and more acknowledged that companies, which are structured around market niches within which they develop competitive and mutualistic interactions, interact in similar ways as biological species. I rely on scientific machine learning to better understand how evolutionary processes arising in economic systems connect to those observed in biological systems.

Economics
Victor Boussange
Victor Boussange
Postdoctoral researcher

Researcher in ecology and evolution, scientific machine learning enthusiastic.

Publications

Processes analogous to ecological interactions and dispersal shape the dynamics of economic activities
Analogies between organisational routines and genes, firms and phenotypes, economic activities and biological populations, and between the processes acting upon these entities, have been used to advance our qualitative understanding of mechanisms driving economic change. Yet, it remained unclear whether biological concepts can be used to quantitatively describe long-term economic change. Here, we use an inverse modelling framework together with economic time-series data to test whether eco-evolutionary processes can explain the collective dynamics of national economic activities. Comparing the support of different biologically inspired dynamic community models against a null model, we find evidence for positive interactions between economic activities and their spatial dispersal.
Victor Boussange, Didier Sornette, Heike Lischke, Loïc Pellissier
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Processes analogous to ecological interactions and dispersal shape the dynamics of economic activities