Sidney G. Winter

The work. With Richard Nelson, Winter wrote An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982), which treats firms as bundles of routines that mutate, get selected, and get copied, rather than as optimizers solving a problem. Capabilities, routines, tacit knowledge, and why some firms keep winning: the strategy and management fields run on his vocabulary, and evolutionary and complexity economics start from his book.

The case for. The book is one of the most cited works in the social sciences and the whole field of dynamic capabilities descends from it. Clarivate's citation, "studies of economic dynamism and organizational behavior inspired by evolutionary theory," names a program that has never been rewarded. He is 91, and if the committee means to honor evolutionary economics it cannot wait.

The case against. Richard Nelson, his co-author, died in 2025, and the committee dislikes rewarding half a pair. Evolutionary economics has lived mostly in management schools rather than economics departments, and the committee has shown little appetite for heterodox programs. The 2025 prize to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt already covered innovation-driven growth.

The KmikeyM angle. KmikeyM is one person run as a firm, and Winter's question is exactly the right one: not what the firm optimizes, but which routines survive shareholder selection and which get voted out. The votes are the mutations. The archive is the fossil record.