Abstract
Is there reason to believe that our brains have evolved to make efficient decisions so that the details of the internal process are irrelevant? I develop a model which illustrates a limitation of adaptive processes: improvements tend to come in the form of kludges. A kludge is a marginal adaptation that compensates for, but does not eliminate, fundamental design inefficiencies. When kludges accumulate, the result can be perpetually suboptimal behavior even in a model of evolution in which arbitrarily large innovations occur infinitely, often with probability 1.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 210-231 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | American Economic Journal: Microeconomics |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 1 2011 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics, Econometrics and Finance(all)