The Rule-Based Approach in the Analysis of Economic Change

While there exist a great many of important cues to the understanding of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, these are scattered across time and the entire landscape of sub-disciplines in economics. Adding to these, insights from neighbouring disciplines also suggest a wide variety of factors affecting the propensity of agents to eventually become entrepreneurs. In order to integrate these factors into a consistent model, this chapter presents the rule-based approach (RBA) as an umbrella theory of socio-economic change. Centre stage in rule-based economics is Homo sapiens oeconomicus (HSO), a heterogeneous agent open to learning and with the capacity to adapt his decision logic to individual circumstances. HSO is a “rule maker and rule user”. We illustrate how the concept of rules and corresponding operations allows tracking the “life cycle” of an idea across the analytical levels of micro, meso and macro.