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Advances in Complex Systems, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2001)
1-2
© World Scientific Publishing Company
In a world of fast growing population, intercontinental trade relations, and
an ever increasing demand for technological innovations and economic growth in a
developing society, the understanding of dynamic processes in economics is one
of the major challenges of the twentyfirst century. 
In the life and social
sciences, one is usually convinced that the evolution of social systems is
determined by numerous factors, difficult to grasp, such as cultural,
sociological, economic, political, and ecological ingredients. However, in
recent years, the development of the interdisciplinary field "science of
complexity" has led to the insight, that complex dynamic processes may also
result from simple interactions. Moreover, at a certain level of abstraction,
one can also find many common features between complex structures in very
different fields. The recent progress in
the understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena in complex systems has also
initiated a lot of activities in analyzing, modeling and simulating "living"
systems with methods from statistical physics. Already in the early seventies,
physicists have realized that these methods can help to understand social
phenomena, such as opinion formation, migration, and settlement formation. But
only very recently, physicists have focussed their interdisciplinary interests
to particular economic processes, such as trading, market dynamics, or company
growth. The
joint efforts of many research groups spread over the world eventually lead to
the establishment of econophysics - a young and fast growing field, the
potential importance of which can be hardly overestimated. Even with the
analysis of financial time series as its current focus, econophysics is meant to
be a more comprehensive enterprise. Basically, econophysics focusses on the
question how and to what extent methods from statistical physics can be used for
the analysis, modeling, simulation, and optimization of economic systems.
In order to
make this enterprise a successful one, a broad and openminded dialog is needed
between physics, economics, and the social sciences. This dialog should help to
overcome the gap between these different disciplines (i) by providing methods
from the natural sciences, which could be adapted to solve problems in social or
economic fields, and (ii) by increasing among natural scientists the sensitivity
for problems in the fields of economics and the social sciences. The present special
issue of Advances in Complex Systems shall contribute to this dialog by
providing contributions of both physicists and economists in the challenging
field of econophysics. These papers have been presented at an international
workshop on Economic Dynamics from the Physics Point of View, which was
organized as the 229th WE-Heraeus Seminar and took place in the Physics Center
Bad Honnef between 27th and 30th of April, 2000 (see http://ais.gmd.de/~frank/WEH-workshop.html
for details).
Basically, the workshop concentrated on two main problems: (i) the analysis of
economic time series and other data with the aim of determining scaling laws and
correlations, (ii) the investigation of microscopic models which mimic economic
systems based on non-linear interactions of a large number of elements. Further
topics were the statistical modeling of decision processes, the emergence of
collective dynamics and chaos in socio-economic systems, as well as
possibilities to control them. The particular emphasis
of the workshop on dynamic micro-models intends to provide insight into economic
interactions, which may eventually explain the complex dynamics found in the
data. Similar to physics, where the structure, properties and dynamics of matter
can be deduced from microscopic interaction laws, one would finally like to
explain the observed macroscopic dynamics of organizations or companies,
markets, and prizes based on non-linear interactions among a huge number of
different individuals (agents). The various
contributions of the workshop are published in the present issue of Advances
in Complex Systems and a special issue of Physica A287, 3-4
(2000). Both special issues have their own focus: contributions with a close
relation to statistical physics, especially those dealing with time series
analysis of economic data, have been selected for Physica A, while
papers focussing on multi-agent approaches to market behavior, technological
evolution, and applications of neural network techniques have been selected for
Advances in Complex Systems. It is the hope of the
guest editors, that the present special issue will stimulate fruitful
discussions among physicists and experts in the socio-economic sciences and
further the international activities and cooperation in the field of
econophysics.