Socio-Economic Dynamics: Networks and Agent-Based Models - Introduction

Recent years have witnessed the increasing interest of physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists for socio-economic systems. In our view, the many reasons behind this can be summarized by observing that traditional approaches to disciplines as sociology and economics have dramatically shown their limitations. The most prominent example is provided by the recent financial crisis which has clearly shown how necessary a paradigm-shift is. However, a merely philosophical change of perspective wouldn’t have been of help at all. What has attracted, and strongly motivated, scientists to approach socio-economic systems is the unprecedented amount of data which has become available. The analysis of these big-data has immediately required the combined effort of experts even coming from traditionally distant disciplines (computer science, physics, applied mathematics, sociology, economics) and pointed out the need of a new, strongly data-driven approach.