Related papers: The (unfortunate) complexity of the economy
Classical economics has developed an arsenal of methods, based on the idea of representative agents, to come up with precise numbers for next year's GDP, inflation and exchange rates, among (many) other things. Few, however, will disagree…
In complex systems, many different parts interact in non-obvious ways. Traditional research focuses on a few or a single aspect of the problem so as to analyze it with the tools available. To get a better insight of phenomena that emerge…
Complex macroscopic behaviour can arise in many-body systems with only very simple elements as a consequence of the combination of competition and inhomogeneity. This paper attempts to illustrate how statistical physics has driven this…
In an informal way, a number of thoughts on the financial crisis 2008 are presented from a physicist's viewpoint, considering the problem as a nonergodicity transition of a spin-glass type of system. Some tentative suggestions concerning…
This paper suggests that business cycles may be a manifestation of coupled real economy and stock market dynamics and describes a mechanism that can generate economic fluctuations consistent with observed business cycles. To this end, we…
Economies are complex man-made systems where organisms and markets interact according to motivations and principles not entirely understood yet. The increasing dissatisfaction with the postulates of traditional economics i.e. perfectly…
Physical analogs have shown considerable promise for understanding the behavior of complex adaptive systems, including macroeconomics, biological systems, social networks, and electric power markets. Many of today's most challenging…
We review the evidence that the erratic dynamics of markets is to a large extent of endogenous origin, i.e. determined by the trading activity itself and not due to the rational processing of exogenous news. In order to understand why and…
The modeling of complex systems such as ecological or socio-economic systems can be very challenging. Although various modeling approaches exist, they are generally not compatible and mutually consistent, and empirical data often do not…
In this chapter the complex systems are discussed in the context of economic and business policy and decision making. It will be showed and motivated that social systems are typically chaotic, non-linear and/or non-equilibrium and therefore…
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and…
The paper discusses various practical consequences of treating economics and finance as an inherently dynamic and chaotic system. On the theoretical side this looks at the general applicability of the market-making pricing approach to…
The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the means to…
This paper discusses serious drawbacks of existing knowledge in macroeconomics and finance in explaining and predicting economic and financial phenomena. Complexity science is proposed as an alternative approach to be used in order to…
Economies and societal structures in general are complex stochastic systems which may not lend themselves well to algebraic analysis. An addition of subjective value criteria to the mechanics of interacting agents will further complicate…
Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly…
This essay discusses the advantages of a probabilistic agent-based approach to questions in theoretical economics, from the nature of economic agents, to the nature of the equilibria supported by their interactions. One idea we propose is…
Existence theory in economics is usually in real domains such as the findings of chaotic trajectories in models of economic growth, tatonnement, or overlapping generations models. Computational examples, however, sometimes converge rapidly…
One 'problem' with the 21st century world, particularly the economic and business worlds, is the phenomenal and increasing number of interconnections between economic agents (consumers, firms, banks, markets, national economies). This…
The paper argues that attracting more economists and adopting a more-precise definition of dynamic complexity might help econophysics acquire more attention in the economics community and bring new lymph to economic research. It may be…