A theoretical physicist by education, Dr Bertrand M. Roehner has been investigating social and economic phenomena during the past 15 years. He is the author of Theory of Markets (1995) which explored the space-time structure of commodity prices, and also of Hidden Collective Factors in Speculative Trading (2001). The approach used in these books demonstrates how the observational strategy invented by physicists and successfully applied in astrophysics and biophysics, can be fruitfully applied in the social sciences as well. Professor Roehner has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard Department of Economics (1994 and 1998) and at the Copenhagen Institute of Economics (1996); and he currently serves on the physics faculty of the University of Paris VII.
Preface
Part I. Econophysics: 1. Why econophysics?
2. The beginnings of econophysics
Part II. How Do Markets Work?: 3. Social man versus homo economicus
4. Organization of speculative markets
Part III. Regularities in Speculative Episodes: 5. Collective behavior of investors
6. Speculative peaks: statistical regularities
Part IV. Theoretical Framework: 7. Two classes of speculative peaks
8. Dynamics of speculative peaks
9. Theoretical framework: implications
References
Index.
