Mendelian explorations

In his most recent book, Daniel Levinthal develops a theory of strategy and organization centred around a "Mendelian executive" who consciously seeks new strategic opportunities but is constrained by path dependence to search in spaces adjacent to the current state of affairs. Building upon this intuition, we present a simple model of exploration and exploitation in complex landscapes showing that path dependence modifies the usual predictions of arm bandit models, especially when agents search in complex spaces where correlation of performance among adjacent alternative is low.