At 05:57 PM 2005/06/01, you wrote:
>I may have missed it, but I have been surprised that the recently emerged
>discipline of econophysics has not yet received much attention during this
>FIS session. This discipline is being forged by the work of physicists
>like Eugene Stanley and economists like Brian Arthur, and it is founded on
>the notion that economies can be better understood as self-organizing
>complex dynamical systems governed by the rules of physics. I am
>personally optimistic about the value of this approach to understanding
>economics, but I don't know enough about it to make a good argument for it
>here. I hope that this post will help to stimulate some discussion about
>econophysics in this forum.
Another fairly recent approach to economics is so-called neuroeconomics.
The idea is to see what is going on inside the head during problems like
gambling decisions, and in general to understand the neural basis of
decision making. Three of my colleagues of a grant to do fMRI studies on
gambling cases. So far the field is just getting off the ground, but my
feeling is that so far it is quite reductionist, and it pays little
attention to information flow or processing (I hope to correct that).
Secondly, the current assumptions tend to lead to looking for reward
increases and decreases rather than reorganization and emergence of new
patterns. I suppose that is OK for a new field. In any case, the
neuroeconomists think they might eventually have something to say to
economists about the nature of economic decision making.
John
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<<<<gwavasig>>>>
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Received on Thu Jun 2 12:10:12 2005
