Bikas K. Chakrabarti – författare

The primary goal of this book is to present the research findings and conclusions of physicists, economists, mathematicians and financial engineers working in the field of "Econophysics" who have undertaken agent-based modelling, comparison with empirical studies and related investigations. Most standard economic models assume the existence of the representative agent, who is “perfectly rational” and applies the utility maximization principle when taking action. One reason for this is the desire to keep models mathematically tractable: no tools are available to economists for solving non-linear models of heterogeneous adaptive agents without explicit optimization. In contrast, multi-agent models, which originated from statistical physics considerations, allow us to go beyond the prototype theories of traditional economics involving the representative agent. This book is based on the Econophys-Kolkata VII Workshop, at which many such modelling efforts were presented. In the book, leading researchers in their fields report on their latest work, consider recent developments and review the contemporary literature.

This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015,an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fieldsof “econophysics” and “sociophysics”, which have emerged from the applicationof statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers fromvaried communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts,mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recentwork, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature.

A society can be described as a group of peoplewho inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involvedthrough their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possibleto observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an examplebeing voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within anyeconomic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has manyfeatures in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It ison these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology andeconomics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value forall with an interest in this flourishing field.

This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to multi-agent, multi-choice repetitive games, such as the Kolkata Restaurant Problem and the Minority Game. It explains how the tangible formulations of these games, using stochastic strategies developed by statistical physicists employing both classical and quantum physics, have led to very efficient solutions to the problems posed. Further, it includes sufficient introductory notes on information-processing strategies employing both classical statistical physics and quantum mechanics. Games of this nature, in which agents are presented with choices, from among which their goal is to make the minority choice, offer effective means of modeling herd behavior and market dynamics and are highly relevant to assessing systemic risk. Accordingly, this book will be of interest to economists, physicists, and computer scientists alike.