J. Doyne Farmer — Santa Fe Institute, Martin Shubik and Eric Smith
We review an emerging body of work by physicists addressing questions of economic organization and function. We suggest that, beyond simply employing models familiar from physics to economic observables, remarkable regularities in economic data may suggest parts of social order that can usefully be incorporated into, and in turn can broaden, the conceptual structure of physics. In the last decade or so physicists have begun to do academic research in economics in a newly emerging field often called “econophysics”. Perhaps a hundred people are now actively involved, with two new journals1 and frequent conferences. At least ten books have been written on econophysics in general or specific subtopics (We are restricted by citation limits here, but an extensive bibliography of the books and archived articles is maintained on the econophysics website, http://www.unifr.ch/econophysics).