This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015,
an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fields
of “econophysics” and “sociophysics”, which have emerged from the application
of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers from
varied communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts,
mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recent
work, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature.
A society can be described as a group of people
who inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involved
through their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possible
to observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an example
being voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within any
economic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has many
features in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It is
on these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology and
economics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value for
all with an interest in this flourishing field.
Author Biography:
Frédéric Abergel is a Professor and Director of the
Laboratory of Mathematics Applied to Systems, École Centrale Paris, Grande voie
des vignes, Châtenay-Malabry, France. His research interests include financial
markets, modeling of derivatives, and empirical properties of financial data.
He has organized a number of international conferences and is also managing
editor of the journal Quantitative
Finance.
He has published many articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Anirban Chakraborti is a Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru
University, India. He gained his PhD in Physics in 2003 for a thesis entitled
“Application of Statistical Physics to some Econophysics and Optimization
Problems” and in 2009 he was awarded an Indian National Science Academy Young
Scientist Medal. His current research focuses on statistical physics and its
interdisciplinary application to problems in complex systems in economic and
social sciences, and combinatorial optimization.
Hideaki Aoyama is a Professor in the Department of
Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Japan. Prior to taking
up this position in 2003, he was Professor in the Faculty of Integrated Human
Studies and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has published 46 research
papers in physics, 3 in linguistics, and 25 in econophysics. He is a lifetime
member of the American Physical Society and former president of the Kyoto
chapter of the Japanese Physical Society.
Bikas K. Chakrabarti is Senior Professor of Physics at
the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India and Visiting Professor of
Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He was elected as a Fellow of the Indian
Academy of Sciences in 1997 and a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy
in 2003. His interests are condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and computational
physics and he is the author of more than 150 refereed papers.
Nivedita Deo is Associate Professor in the Department
of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, India. Her research interests
include statistical mechanics of superstrings, quantum chaos, glasses, the spectrum
of instantaneous normal modes in liquids and random matrices, and the mathematical
properties of random matrix models. She is the author of many articles in
peer-reviewed publications.
Dhruv Raina is a Professor at the Zakir Husain Centre
for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, India. He is also Honorary Director of the Northern
Regional Centre, Indian Council for Social Science Research. Professor Raina
has received many honors and awards. He has held the Heinrich Zimmer Chair for
Indian Philosophy and Intellectual History at the University of Heidelberg,
Germany and in 2015 was Visiting Professor at Université Paris Diderot.
Irena Vodenska is Assistant
Professor in the Administrative Sciences Department, Metropolitan College,
Boston University, USA. In addition to teaching finance courses, she has
directed interdisciplinary research in collaboration with Boston University
College of Arts and Sciences Physics Department. She is also Chief Investment
Officer and founding partner of Amectron International LLC, Boston, Mass. and
past Associate Director for Research, Center for Finance, Law, and Policy,
Boston University.