The arrival of the new
Prof. Luigi Marengo, LUISS-Rome
In this work we present a number of urn models in which, contrary to standard
Polya urns, the number of competing alternatives is not given from the outset but
may increase with the arrival of innovations. We begin by describing a variant of
Polya urns, rst introduced by Fred Hoppe, in which balls of previously non-existing
colours are added with some (declining) probability. We then propose new variants
in which the probability of the arrival on new colours is itself subject to adaptive
change depending on the success of past innovations and discuss applications to
evolutionary models of technologies and industries. We numerically simulate di er-
ent speci cations of these urns with adaptively changing mutation rate and show
that they can account for complex patterns of evolution in which periods of explo-
ration with clusters of innovations are followed by periods in which the dynamics
of the system is driven by selection among a stable set of alternatives.
About the speaker
Luigi MARENGO is professor of Economics and Dean of the Department of Business and Management at LUISS University in Rome. He has a PhD in Innovation Studies from the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, UK, and through his early academic career he worked at the Universities of Sussex, Strasbourg, Trento, Teramo and IIASA (International Institute for Advance Systems Analysis, Austria). Before moving to LUISS (in March 2014) he spend eight years at the Sant’Anna School for Advanced Studies in Pisa, where he was also Dean of the School of Social Sciences. He has extensively published in such international journals as Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Research Policy, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics. His main research interests are in organizational economics, decision theory, economics of innovation. He his managing editor of the journal Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, published by Elsevier and indexed in ISI Web of Science and Scopus.
Venue: Conference Room
Date: 07 May 2015
Time: 12:30 - 13:30 CEST
