%0 Journal Article
%T The Econophysical turn and economic complexity
%A Christophe Schinckus
%J Frontiers in Physics
%D 2014
%I Frontiers Media
%R 10.3389/fphy.2014.00041
%X This general commentary extends the excellent paper written by Buchanan in a previous issue of Nature Physics (¡°What has econophysics ever done for us?¡±, Nature Physics, vol.9, 317,2013) in which the author proposed a list of ¡°good things¡± related to contribution of econophysics. Rather than detailing the major results of econophysics which could be potentially interesting for economics (see point 1 to 7 in [1]), this note extends the 8th point proposed by Buchanan by emphasising the methodological contribution of the first to the latter for a better understanding of economic complexity. Econophysics is a new interdisciplinary field that emerged in the shadow of physics. Roughly speaking, econophysics refers to the application of physical tools\models for describing the evolution of complex economic systems such as financial markets, inter-firm transactions or credit networks. The increasing number of papers in physics journal dedicated to econophysics contributed to the official recognition of the field by the Physics and Astrophysics Classification Scheme (PACS) since it is nowadays an official subcategory of physics under the code 89.65 Gh. Like the vast majority of emerging interdisciplinary fields, econophysics generated a lot of debates leading some authors [1] to question the contribution of econophysics or even to deny its potential contribution [2]. Although the economic mainstream usually modelled the market behaviour as an addition of agents¡¯ behaviours, econophysicists consider that social systems are ¡°more than the sum of their parts¡± by emphasizing the fact that economics is concerned with emergent phenomena and complex systems. Conceptually, this idea is nothing new since Hayek [3] dealt with this kind of emergent phenomena in society. Hayek defined self-regulating emergence as a phenomenon based on multiple agents interacting in such a way as to generate the macro-properties of economic systems. Hayek called ¡°Catallaxy¡± this emergence of a self-order in the economic systems that he presented more as a political argument than a scientific one since he did not give an operational definition to this phenomenon. In contrast to Hayek, econophysicists develop an operational form characterizing the emergence in economic complex systems without giving a political argument. By using a formal Chomskian definition of language (as a complex adaptative system), Loreto & Steels [4] made statistical physics relevant for studying its emergence and evolution. The emergence of money is another topic dealt by physicists: Bak, Paczuski & Shubik [5] showed
%K econophysics
%K Agent Based Modelling
%K Complexity
%K Economics
%K interdisciplinarity
%U http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fphy.2014.00041/full