How and why our conventional economic thinking causes global crises (discussion paper)

Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich (20 February 2013)

I believe it's no wonder that our world is in trouble. We currently lack the global systems science needed to understand our world, which is now changing more quickly than we can collect the experience required to cope with upcoming problems. We can also not trust our intuition, since the complex systems we have created behave often in surprising, counter-intuitive ways. Frequently, their properties are not determined by their components, but their interactions. Therefore, a strongly coupled world behaves fundamentally different from a weakly coupled world with independent decision-makers. Strong interactions tend to make the system uncontrollable - they create cascading effects and extreme events.
FuturICT and Social Sciences: Big Data, Big Thinking

Rosaria Conte, Nigel Gilbert, Giulia Bonelli, and Dirk Helbing (19 July 2011)

Imagine storing all the computational information produced in the world in just one year: you would have a pile of DVDs able to reach the Moon and back. How about all the data collected since the beginning of the computer era? The quantity is so huge that traditional units of measurement cannot cope. For this reason a few years ago computer scientists started talking about “Big Data”, referring to the gathering, formatting, analysing and manipulating of a massive amount of digital information.
Guest Editorial: Achilles' heels of current economic theories - The debate

Dirk Helbing, ETHZ, Switzerland (18 April 2011)

A guest editorial by Dirk Helbing (ETHZ, Switzerland) presenting an ongoing debate on the Achilles' heels of current economic theories.
Worrying signs of “new thinking”

YC Zhang (12 April 2010)

During the spectacular financial market crashes and the resulted recession, there has been renewed assault on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and its theoretical basis—mainstream economics. George Soros announced Oct. 2009 that he will put 50 million dollars over ten years to establish an “Institute for New Economic Thinking”.
Solving the apparent diversity-accuracy dilemma of recommender systems

Fribourg team (24 March 2010)

Focus of our research group changes in time and so it happened that in the last few years we were thinking more about information filtering than about financial markets. As a landmark of this period, we recently got a paper published in PNAS.
Registration and paper upload problems fixed

Econophysics Team (6 May 2009)

The problems that some users have experienced uploading papers or registering with Econophysics Forum have been fixed. Many thanks for your patience while we tracked down the source of this problem!
New functionality at the Econophysics Forum

Fribourg Team (1 May 2009)

After an off-period (which was longer than expected and for which we apologize), we are glad to have the Econophysics Forum up again with some new functionality added.
Economics needs a scientific revolution

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (9 January 2009)

Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing. Rockets fly to the moon, energy is extracted from minute changes of atomic mass without major havoc, global positioning satellites help millions of people to find their way home. What is the flagship achievement of economics, apart from its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises, including the current worldwide credit crunch?
Fribourg Symposium

Yi-Cheng Zhang and Damien Challet (16 October 2008)

Last November we had an exciting gathering of many people who are/were physicists or other natural scientists but are working in finance, insurance and related sectors -- an occasion built upon the so-called econophysics community that brought together both academics and practitioners in an intimate encounter.
A new face for Econophysics Forum

Yi-Cheng Zhang and Joseph Wakeling (30 April 2008)

Econophysics Forum is now 10 years old — and though the old interface has served its time honourably, it is well due an update. From the beginning our aim was to create a platform to foster and facilitate cooperation and communication among researchers in our field. The huge advances in web development and technology since then mean that it is now possible to create functionality that perhaps could not even be dreamed of in 1998. We have begun our overhaul with an update of the graphical interface and a cleaning-out and streamlining of website code, without affecting its functionality. This is however only the first step on a longer journey to redevelop Econophysics Forum as a genuinely collaborative platform.