Markets come to bits: Evolution, computation and markomata in economic science

Based upon my previous historical work, I attempt to isolate and identify what appears to be a profound shift in the conception of the economy in recent economic research, focusing on five areas: mechanism design, zero-intelligence agents, ‘market microstructure’, engineering economics and artificial intelligence. The shift identified concerns treating markets as diverse algorithms, and will have profound effects upon the conceptual frames used to address the economy. Rather than deal in vague imponderables, in the paper we proceed to sketch the emergent outlines of the implicit alternative program of an evolutionary computational economics constructed from the theory of automata which situates the problematic existence of diverse market species at the very center of the research agenda, and not, as happens all too frequently, to relegate it to the margins of modern economic thought. The laws that are sought under the new paradigm are laws of the markets, not laws of human nature.