Abstract Summary
Margaret Morrison (University of Toronto)
Significant emphasis has been placed on the role of universality in economics where scaling results are found to hold for widely different economies and very different time periods. This has led to applications of methods from statistical physics to economics (financial markets) and modelling market crashes as the social analogue of phase transitions. However, questions arise regarding the explanatory value of this methodology, given that statistical econophysics typically construes agents as having zero intelligence and interacting randomly. I explore these issues and whether agent-based modelling which incorporates motives and desires can fill the explanatory gaps created by statistical modelling approaches.
