"Gangnam Style" singer Psy will NOT sue an L.A. restaurant for naming itself after the famous song -- in fact, Psy's pumped ... because as far as he's concerned ... imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The restaurant never bothered to get Psy's permission to use the name -- but sources close to the singer tell TMZ, he doesn't give a crap ... because where he comes from, imitation is a form of honor.

That means when companies copy they often do it clumsily. Shenkar offers the example of the legacy airlines in the United States and their response to the low-cost threat of Southwest Airlines. Most set up copycat airlines of their own: United with TED, Continental with CALite, Delta with Song. All quickly failed.

The problem, Shenkar argues, is that in their scramble to copy Southwest, the bigger airlines failed to see the ways that central pillars of Southwest's strategy -- lower pay, short point-to-point flights, a fleet of identical smaller planes -- were incompatible with the union contracts, hub-and-spoke route structures, and larger craft the traditional carriers were saddled with.

Shenkar traces our innovation fetish back to the late 18th century. Before that -- for most of Western history, in other words -- copying was valued just as highly as creation, and sometimes more. "In the Roman Empire, where imitation was used to align the diverse cultures and institutions of the far-flung empire under a single umbrella, it served as the official pedagogy," he writes in his book. Centuries later, Adam Smith wrote that imitation should be given "the status of a creative art." But the Romantic Age, with its celebration of the sui generis and the solitary genius -- philosophers like Rousseau, poets like Shelley, and scientist-inventors like Humphry Davy -- began to change that. Copying came to be seen as disreputable, as a refuge for the unimaginative.

A group of researchers set out to answer this question, and published their results in Science last week. To tackle the issue, the researchers set up a computer-based tournament based on Robert Axelrod's 'Prisoner's Dilemma' competitions in the late 1970s. In this type of tournament, entrants submit computerized strategies that compete against each other in a virtual world. Individuals, or "agents," with the most successful strategies survive and reproduce, while less successful strategies die out.

In each round of the social learning tournament, automated agents could choose from 100 behaviors, each of which returned a certain payoff. The payoffs changed over the course of the tournament, simulating changing environmental conditions that might render a behavior more or less useful. In any round, agents could make one of three moves: use a behavior they already knew (Exploit), use asocial learning to test a new behavior by trial-and-error (Innovate), or learn socially by watching a behavior that another agent was performing in that round (Observe). Out of the three possible moves, only Exploit resulted in a payoff; the two learning moves would only return information about how profitable the behavior was in the current environmental conditions. Social learning was especially costly; if Observe was played when no other agent was performing a novel behavior, the agent learned nothing.