The traditional financial paradigm seeks to understand financial markets by using models in which markets are perfect, which includes agents who are "rational" and update their beliefs correctly based on new information. By comparison, the new institutional economics approach attempts to provide a more realistic picture of economic processes, even in financial markets, by postulating several market imperfections, including the agents' limited rationality. In contrast, behavioral finance completely challenges the rationality assumption and aims to improve the understanding of financial markets by assuming that, due to psychological factors, investors' decisions will contradict the expected utility theory. However, the traditional, new institutional and the behavioral finance models all share one important feature: They are all based on the notion of a representative agent even though this mythological figure is dressed differently. Evolutionary finance suggests a model of portfolio selection and asset price dynamics that is explicitly based on the ideas of investors' heterogeneity, dynamics and changes, learning and a natural selection of strategies. The paper suggests a systematization of this new approach, which is subsequently used to conduct a state-of-the-art literature survey and an evaluation of evolutionary finance research.

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The social and economic sciences are grounded on the basic assumption that social life, decision-making behavior, and consciousness are classical physical and therefore material phenomena. Quantum social science, a new research area, which refers to the knowledge and interpretations of quantum physics, is challenging this assumption. This paper gives an overview of quantum social science and explains quantum decision theory on the one hand with a focus on the cognitive biases first elaborated by Kahneman & Tversky, and on the other hand by Darwin´s theory of evolution.

Fintech entrepreneurship has already influenced financial markets and their players worldwide in a disruptive, but also a risky way (Thakor, 2020; Zeranski & Sancak, 2020). In this context, it seems worthwhile to analyze which factors drive the design and development of global fintech entrepreneurship. Thus, the paper takes fintech-related research a step further by exploring the drivers of fintech evolution in different countries and continents that display different levels of fintech activity. For this purpose, first economic, technological, legal, and cultural factors influencing the development of fintech entrepreneurship are examined from an evolutionary point of view, and second, a generalized linear mixed model is used in order to evaluate the statistical relevance of these factors on fintech entrepreneurship more comprehensively. The analyzed data period from 2000 to 2017 also makes it possible to assess the influence of the dot.com bubble and the financial crisis on fintech entrepreneurship. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that the gross domestic product (GDP), regulatory burden, government tech procurement and the degree of individualism are important drivers of fintech startup activity. These findings help gauge the present and future market position of fintechs, leading to implications for entrepreneurs, competitors, and regulators alike.