Some economic phenomena are predictable and controllable, and some are impos sible to foresee. Existing economic theories do not provide satisfactory answers as to what degree economic phenomena can be predicted and controlled, and in what situations. Against this background, people working on the financial front lines in real life have to rely on empirical rules based on experiments that often lack a solid foundation. "Econophysics" is a new science that analyzes economic phenomena empirically from a physical point of view, and it is being studied mainly to offer scientific, objective and...

Some economic phenomena are predictable and controllable, and some are impos sible to foresee. Existing economic theories do not provide satisfactory answers as to what degree economic phenomena can be predicted and controlled, and in what situations. Against this background, people working on the financial front lines in real life have to rely on empirical rules based on experiments that often lack a solid foundation. "Econophysics" is a new science that analyzes economic phenomena empirically from a physical point of view, and it is being studied mainly to offer scientific, objective and...

In recent years, as part of the increasing "informationization" of industry and the economy, enterprises have been accumulating vast amounts of detailed data such as high-frequency transaction data in nancial markets and point-of-sale information onindividualitems in theretail sector. Similarly,vast amountsof data arenow ava- able on business networks based on inter rm transactions and shareholdings. In the past, these types of information were studied only by economists and management scholars. More recently, however, researchers from other elds, such as physics, mathematics, and information...