Ford School political scientist Jenna Bednar and co-author Scott Page, John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor, offer a new framework to understand the complex interplay between institutions and culture in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
In “Institutions and cultural capacity: A systems perspective,” Bednar and Page introduce a theoretical model to analyze how institutions and cultural capacity coevolve—that is, how they influence and shape each other over time. Previous models about institutions didn’t have a way to incorporate the effects of culture and its feedback loops, explained Bednar. Institutions don’t operate in isolation; they are influenced by each other and by culture.
Complexity economics is a perspective that views the economy as a living system, where countless individual decisions and interactions create unpredictable patterns.
The special issue stems from a 2023 Sante Fe Institute conference which welcomed 40 experts who apply complexity economics in industry and policy making. The included articles shed light on today’s pressing problems: climate economics, inequality and institutions, technological change, production networks, macroeconomics, and agent-based modeling methods.
Read the special issue in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (July 2025) and a related article from the Santa Fe Institute.
