This collection is inspired by the coming retirement of Professor Wolfram Elsner. It presents cutting-edge economic research relevant to economic policies and policy-making, placing a strong focus on innovative perspectives. The interested reader will find careful reconsiderations of the historical development of institutional and evolutionary theories, enlightening theoretical contributions, interdisciplinary ideas, as well as insightful applications. The collection serves to highlight the common ground and the synergies between the various approaches and thereby to contribute to an emerging coherent framework of alternative theories in economics.

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. Introduction to the Festschrift for Wolfram Elsner - Claudius Gräbner, Torsten Heinrich and Henning Schwardt

2. Economic Complexity and Trade-offs in Policy Decisions - Henning Schwardt, Claudius Gräbner, Torsten Heinrich, Christian Cordes and Georg Schwesinger

3. The Psychology of Neoclassical Economists - Sebastian Berger

4. Evolutionary Political Economy and the Complexity of Economic Policy: Power, Knowledge and Learning - Jakob Kapeller and Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle

5. Using the Social Fabric Matrix to Strengthen the Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems for Original Institutional Economics - F. Gregory Hayden

6. Themes in an institutionalist theory of economic policy - Paolo Ramazzotti

7. On the evolutionary foundations of the dynamic capability view: An exercise using the methodology of isolation - Kalevi Kyläheiko

8. The Enduring Tension: The Political Economy of Industrial Policy - James I. Sturgeon

9. Co-Evolutionary Processes in a Model of Long Run Economic Development - Andreas Pyka and Pier Paolo Saviotti

10. Alternative Policies after the Financial Crisis: New Thinking from Complex Evolutionary Economics - Ping Chen

11. On crises and changes of growth regimes after the 2008 financial crisis: a regulationist perspective - Pascal Petit

12. Innovation and National Systems of Innovation Policies: A Network Approach - Shuanping Dai

13. Towards an Interactive System for innovation Policies

Conclusion

Claudius Gräbner is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Institute of Institutional and Innovation Economics at the University of Bremen, Germany

Torsten Heinrich holds a post-doc position and teaches at the University of Bremen, Germany

Henning Schwardt received his Ph.D. from the University of Bremen in 2012. His has authored and co-authored books on economic development and microeconomics, as well as peer-reviewed articles in many well-known economic journals.