Similar ideas have occurred to economists before. Economist Thorstein Veblen proposed that economics should be an evolutionary science as early as 1898; even earlier Thomas Robert Malthus had a profound influence on Darwin himself with his musings on a “struggle for existence.”
Just as natural selection postulates that certain organisms are best able to survive in a particular ecological niche, the adaptive-market hypothesis considers different market players from banks to mutual funds as “species” that are competing for financial success. And it assumes that these players at times use the seat-of-the-pants heuristics described by behavioral economics when investing (“competing”) and that they sometimes adopt irrational strategies, such as taking bigger risks during a losing streak.
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