Econophys-Kolkata: A Short Story

Abstract

Following the early studies of the Traveling Salesman and other multivariate optimization problems, employing classical statistical [1] and quantum mechanical [2] tricks, during 1985–1990, the Kolkata group made some of the earliest modelling investigations regarding the nature of wealth and income distribution in societies and its comparison with the energy distribution in some (quantum) gases. In the 1994 Kolkata Conference, many Indian economists (mainly from Indian Statistical Institute campuses) and physicists discussed about the possible formulations of some of the economic problems and their solutions using tricks from physics [3]. In fact, in one of these papers in the proceedings, possibly the first published joint paper involving both physicist and economist (Sugata Marjit) Indian co-authors [4], the possibility of ideal-gas like model of trading market was discussed. Among other things, it tried to identify, from the known effects of various fiscal policies, the equivalence of the kinetic energy of the gas molecules with the money of the agents in the market and of temperature with the average money in the market. Such a ‘finite temperature’ gas model of the market was first noted by Dietrich Stauffer (Cologne) [5]. With the possibility of putting more than one agent in the same microstate, identified by the price or money income of the agent in the market, the likely distribution was concluded there [4] to be Bose-Einstein like, rather than Gibbs like.