Eugene Stanley (1941-) | Eugene Stanley (1941-) |
| American physicist Eugene Stanley, who completed his BS in physics at Wesleyan University in 1962, followed by work in biological physics under Max Delbruck in 1963, followed by a 1963 PhD on critical phenomena in magnetic systems at Harvard, investigates, since 1995, has been investigating, at Boston University, the notion that economic agents, in their herd effect like behavior preferences, can be modeled as electron spins, and also that Vilfredo Pareto power laws like Pareto principles can be studied in economics via physics. | |
Econophysics: Using Statistical Physics Concepts to Better Understand Economic Questions
A physicist views the economy as a collection of interacting units. This collection is complex; everything depends on everything else. The interesting problem is: how does everything depend on everything else? Physicists are looking for laws that will help us understand this complex interaction. To a physicist, the most interesting thing about economics is that it is dominated by fluctuations in quantities of economic interest. Because big economic shocks affect the economy around the world, the possibility of an economic “meltdown” is one that we must take seriously. Big changes in big money affect not only people with large amounts of it, but also those who have very little of it—those on the margins of society. Finding ideas that serve to solve economic problems can potentially help in making progress on unsolved physics problems. A good example is turbulence. If we take a bucket of water and disturb the surface, energy is added to the system on a big scale. This energy then dissipates over progressively smaller scales. This is an unsolved physics problem; many empirical facts can be stated, but little can be said about understanding it. The economy is analogous to this example of turbulence. One can add information on a big scale to an economic system—e.g., the news of who wins a presidential election—and that information is dissipated on smaller and smaller scales. The way that you handle the “turbulence” associated with this dissipation of information in a financial market may help us understand how to approach turbulence in our physics research."
 |  Victor Yakovenko (1961-) |
| Research Econophysics: Applications of statistical physics to economics and finance. |
Victor Yakovenko’s Econophysics Research Group | Collaborators
● Victor Yakovenko, Econophysics group head.(add discussion)
● J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., Professor of Economics and holder of the Kirby L. Kramer Jr. Chair of Business Administration (James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia), Honorary Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2008-2009)
● Anand Banerjee, graduate student (2005-2008) Ph.D.
now a postdoctoral fellow at NIH
● Justin Chen, undergraduate student from Caltech (2007 summer),
developed computer animation of money exchange models
Richard Prange, Professor Emeritus of Physics (2002-2008), deceased
● A. Christian Silva, graduate student (2002-2005) Ph.D.
now with the Evnine-Vaughan Associates, San Francisco
● Adrian Dragulescu, graduate student (1997-2002) Ph.D.
now a risk analyst at the Constellation Energy Group in Baltimore
 |  Joseph McCauley (1943-) |
| In 2004, American physicist Joseph McCauley published his Dynamics of Markets: Econophysics and Finance, wherein he outlined his ideas on how physics, but NOT thermodynamics, applies to to the study of financial markets, and in 2008 launched an econophysics department at the University of Houston, which supposedly produces graduate students in econophysics. | |
Econophysics - Introduction
Econophysics, also known as the physics of finance, is the study of the dynamical behavior of financial and economic markets. Recently, a vast amount of market data has become available allowing empirical studies of market behavior to be performed. In the econophysics group at the University of Houston, we begin with these empirical studies to measure what the statistical properties of actual dynamics of markets are and then model that behavior mathematically. The models we create and study vary from discrete agent-based ones appropriate for short-time scale behavior to continuous stochastic ones appropriate for longer time scale behavior.There are many interesting and important open questions about market dynamics that interest us. These include questions about how to properly measure and explain the important properties of market dynamics, about the stability of markets, and about what the differences are in the behavior of different types of markets. We are also interested in how the dynamics of markets impacts society. The faculty member in the econophyiscs group include Professors Joseph L. McCauley, Kevin E. Bassler, Gemunu H. Gunaratne, George F. Reiter and David R. Criswell, as well as Dr. Valery A. Kholodni, an adjunct professor.
