Modeling Long-Term Macroeconomic Growth as a Micro-Based, Path Dependent, Experimentally Organized Economic Process

The lead theme of this essay asserts that a model of economic growth has to be explicit about the market dynamics of firm behavior. Firm dynamics originates in innovative behavior and in the price and quantity adjustments of agents when their mutually inconsistent plans are confronted in markets. Three characteristics determine what I call the experimentally organized model of an evolving economy; (1) the size of the opportunity set ("state space"), (2) the presence of "bounded rationality" and "tacit knowledge" ("behavior"), and (3) the degree of access to market opportunities.