Abstract

A recent trend in economics has been to appeal to evolutionary theory when addressing various open questions in the subject. I here further investigate one particular such appeal to evolutionary biology: the argument that, since markets select firms as coherent units, firms should be seen to be genuine economic agents. To assess this argument, I present a model of firm/office selection in a competitive market, and show that there are cases where markets can select for firms/offices as collective units – and thus, as agents of their own – but also that there are cases where they do not. In this way, I try to make the evolutionary argument for the agency-based view of the firm more precise