The Minority Game is a physicist's attempt to explain market behaviour by the interaction between traders. With a minimal set of ingredients and drastic assumptions, this model reproduces market ecology among different types of traders. Its emphasis is on speculative trading and information flow. The book first describes the philosophy lying behind the conception of the Minority Game in 1997, and includes in particular a discussion about the El Farol bar problem. It then reviews the main steps in later developments, including both the theory and its applications to market phenomena. 'Minority...

This respected high-level text is aimed at students and professionals working on random processes in various areas, including physics and finance. The first author, Melvin Lax (1922-2002) was a distinguished Professor of Physics at City College of New York and a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, and is widely known for his contributions to our understanding of random processes in physics. Most chapters of this book are outcomes of the class notes which Lax taught at the City University of New York from 1985 to 2001. The material is unique as it presents the theoretical...

A variety of different social, natural and technological systems can be described by the same mathematical framework. This holds from Internet to the Food Webs and to the connections between different company boards given by common directors. In all these situations a graph of the elements and their connections displays a universal feature of some few elements with many connections and many with few. This book reports the experimental evidence of these Scale-free networks'' and provides to students and researchers a corpus of theoretical results and algorithms to analyse and understand these...