Hideaki Aoyama – 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 systematically provides a prospective integrated approach for complexity social science in its view of statistical physics and mathematics, with an impressive collection of the knowledge and expertise of leading researchers from all over the world. The book mainly covers both finitary methods of statistical equilibrium and data-driven analysis by econophysics.

The late Professor Masanao Aoki of UCLA, who passed away at the end of July 2018, in his later years dedicated himself to the reconstruction of macroeconomics mainly in terms of statistical physics. Professor Aoki, who was already an IEEE fellow, was also named an Econometric Society Fellow in 1979. Until the early 1990s, however, his contributions were focused on the new developments of a novel algorithm for the time series model and their applications to economic data. Those contributions were undoubtedly equivalent to the Nobel Prize-winning work of Granger''s "co-integration method". Afterthe publications of his New Approaches to Macroeconomic Modeling and Modeling Aggregate Behavior and Fluctuations in Economics, both published by Cambridge University Press, in 1996 and 2002, respectively, his contributions rapidly became known and spread throughout the field. In short, these new works challenged econophysicists to develop evolutionary stochastic dynamics, multiple equilibria, and externalities as field effects and revolutionized the stochastic views of interacting agents. In particular, the publication of Reconstructing Macroeconomics, also by Cambridge University Press (2007), in cooperation with Hiroshi Yoshikawa, further sharpened the process of embodying “a perspective from statistical physics and combinatorial stochastic processes” in economic modeling. Interestingly, almost concurrently with Prof. Aoki’s newest development, similar approaches were appearing. Thus, those who were working in the same context around the world at that time cametogether, exchanging their results during the past decade. In memory of Prof. Aoki, this book has been planned by authors who followed him to present the most advanced outcomes of his heritage.