Economic Darwinism in managerial decision-making and project selection

¶ … Economic Darwinism Theory

Economic Darwinism

Definition of the concept: Many economic terms flood our everyday academic life. Economic Darwinism is one of them and relates to the way individuals (and managers in our case) behave on the market place. Why is this important? Because the behavior of managers influence the activity of the company they ran, so from a particular perspective we can say that it influences the competition, the rivalry among competitors, and also to a certain extent the goods made available to end-consumers. Economic Darwinism implies two different aspects: selection - in case of behaviors leading to different results, people tend to replace the behavior with the lowest performances with an arbitrary behavior, and mutation - when a particular behavior has a positive aspect, then the individual has little incentives to pass to an arbitrary behavior.

Example of the concept

When considering different investments, for example, managers have different business alternatives which must be analyzed in order to convey the best alternative that will meet the objectives of the investment project. The analysis is based on different criterions, each criterion receiving a priority according to company's development policy. According to Economic Darwinism principle, people will prefer to replace the alternative with the lowest potential (in terms of return, profit, solvability, etc.) with another random solution, which may it could turn out to be more successful than the initial option. In the project evaluation process, all alternatives receive different points according to the criterions and requirements of the company. Of course, that only the investments with a positive return will remain in the battle for the best alternative. Every such alternative will be further on debated, in order to see which of the project solution best fit the company's development policy.