Econophysics and Sociophysics: Recent Progress and Future Directions

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.

Frédéric Abergel is a Professor and Director of theLaboratory of Mathematics Applied to Systems, École Centrale Paris, Grande voiedes vignes, Châtenay-Malabry, France. His research interests include financialmarkets, modeling of derivatives, and empirical properties of financial data.He has organized a number of international conferences and is also managingeditor of the journal QuantitativeFinance.He has published many articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Anirban Chakraborti is a Professor at Jawaharlal NehruUniversity, India. He gained his PhD in Physics in 2003 for a thesis entitled“Application of Statistical Physics to some Econophysics and OptimizationProblems” and in 2009 he was awarded an Indian National Science Academy YoungScientist Medal. His current research focuses on statistical physics and itsinterdisciplinary application to problems in complex systems in economic andsocial sciences, and combinatorial optimization.

Hideaki Aoyama is a Professor in the Department ofPhysics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Japan. Prior to takingup this position in 2003, he was Professor in the Faculty of Integrated HumanStudies and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has published 46 researchpapers in physics, 3 in linguistics, and 25 in econophysics. He is a lifetimemember of the American Physical Society and former president of the Kyotochapter of the Japanese Physical Society.

Bikas K. Chakrabarti is Senior Professor of Physics atthe Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India and Visiting Professor ofEconomics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.  He was elected as a Fellow of the IndianAcademy of Sciences in 1997 and a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academyin 2003. His interests are condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and computationalphysics and he is the author of more than 150 refereed papers.

Nivedita Deo is Associate Professor in the Departmentof Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, India. Her research interestsinclude statistical mechanics of superstrings, quantum chaos, glasses, the spectrumof instantaneous normal modes in liquids and random matrices, and the mathematicalproperties of random matrix models. She is the author of many articles inpeer-reviewed publications.

 

Dhruv Raina is a Professor at the Zakir Husain Centrefor Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal NehruUniversity, New Delhi, India. He is also Honorary Director of the NorthernRegional Centre, Indian Council for Social Science Research. Professor Rainahas received many honors and awards. He has held the Heinrich Zimmer Chair forIndian Philosophy and Intellectual History at the University of Heidelberg,Germany and in 2015 was Visiting Professor at Université Paris Diderot.

 

Irena Vodenska is AssistantProfessor in the Administrative Sciences Department, Metropolitan College,Boston University, USA. In addition to teaching finance courses, she hasdirected interdisciplinary research in collaboration with Boston UniversityCollege of Arts and Sciences Physics Department. She is also Chief InvestmentOfficer and founding partner of Amectron International LLC, Boston, Mass. andpast Associate Director for Research, Center for Finance, Law, and Policy,Boston University.