At the beginning of the XX-th century, after a glorious history of about two centuries, the Newton’s classical physics enters into a great conceptual crisis, marked by the famous findings, which have subsequently represented the fundamentals of the quantum theory. They have thrown out the visions of the classical physics on the main laws of Universe development, the role of the human being and of knowledge in its functioning. Therefore, the quantum theory, confusing the traditional picture of its origin and evolution, gave birth to multiple conceptual issues related not only to physics, but disposing of obvious philosophical, ontological, cognitive and, more recently, economic aspects...
At the beginning of the XX-th century, after a glorious history of about two centuries, the Newton’s classical physics enters into a great conceptual crisis, marked by the famous findings, which have subsequently represented the fundamentals of the quantum theory. They have thrown out the visions of the classical physics on the main laws of Universe development, the role of the human being and of knowledge in its functioning. Therefore, the quantum theory, confusing the traditional picture of its origin and evolution, gave birth to multiple conceptual issues related not only to physics, but disposing of obvious philosophical, ontological, cognitive and, more recently, economic aspects...
This volume of the Quantum Economics Textbook Series is devoted to quantum human economics. For more than a century, mainstream economics has imagined its object as a clockwork: an agent is endowed with complete and stable preferences and full information, solves for a unique optimum under given constraints, and the market glides toward equilibrium along a mechanical orbit. With the solemnity of its logic and the beauty of its geometry, this system has become the gateway through which generation after generation enters the discipline. Yet precisely at the foundation of this system the cracks have grown unmistakable. Classical models, at the level of their axioms, delete superposition, interference, entanglement, measurement collapse, and the waxing and waning of coherence; they therefore struggle to accommodate multiple equilibria, path dependence, network effects, herding, critical collapse, and deep uncertainty. The quantum reconstruction offered here does not treat quantum physics as an ornamental metaphor. It re-founds, on the ground of practical ontology, the mathematical and conceptual architecture that quantum theory has forged for a complex world, and transplants it onto quantum human economics. Classical and neoclassical insights are recovered as special cases in the limit of complete decoherence. The whole book unfolds in a unified state–operator–evolution formalism. Each chapter first explains the classical theory thoroughly, then presents an original quantum construction, rigorous derivation, a real historical case, and a dialogue with the great economists; equations are rendered precisely as native Word math objects, and figures and tables are drawn expressly to support the argument. The book suits undergraduates building intuition, graduate students and researchers advancing to the frontier, and practitioners in policy and business.
Abstract Since Adam Smith, economics has erected a grand edifice upon the foundations of rational agents, equilibrium analysis, and linear causality; however, the 2008 global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic have successively revealed its fundamental limitations when confronted with complex economic phenomena: bubbles that ought not to have existed, crises unforeseen by equilibrium models, non-linear ruptures brought about by technological revolutions, and self-fulfilling expectations—all of which call for a richer theoretical language. This book serves as the foundational introduction to the "Quantum Economics Textbook Series," as well as the first gateway into this entire series. It introduces the methodological framework, mathematical apparatus, and philosophical insights of quantum mechanics to economic analysis, grounding its approach in the core proposition of a practical ontology—that human economic practice itself possesses quantum attributes such as superposition, entanglement, constructibility, uncertainty, and emergence—thereby reconstructing the economic world as a quantum process of superposition and evolution. Six core concepts—superposition, entanglement, measurement collapse, the uncertainty principle, quantum transitions, and emergence—run throughout the work. Quantum economics does not represent a simple negation of classical theory; rather, it constitutes a dialectical sublation: under the classical limit—where decoherence is complete, the measurement basis is fixed, and entanglement vanishes—quantum theory precisely reduces to classical theory. This book comprises five parts and thirty chapters: Part I establishes the paradigm shift and theoretical framework, covering critiques of Newton's worldview, the quantum worldview, a foundational conceptual framework, mathematical foundations, and research methodologies; Part II reconstructs quantum microeconomic theory, encompassing consumers, producers, pricing, markets, the wave-particle duality of markets, quantum games, and welfare economics; Part III builds quantum macroeconomic theory, addressing national income accounting, money, inflation, economic cycles, policy, and open economies; Part IV explores quantum finance and market dynamics, including asset pricing, portfolio management, market sentiment, risk management, and trading theory; Part V extends the scope to organizations, innovation, institutions, development, economic ethics, and the digital economy, while offering insights into the future of this discipline. This volume is intended for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in economics and related fields, and serves as the essential first volume in the quantum economics series.
Quantum mechanics represents one of the great conceptual revolu- tions of the 20th century. It has raised a huge number of fundamental questions of both physical and philosophical kind. • What does matter mean at all? • What are the main properties or characteristics of matter? • Can matter be reduced to information? • Is our universe probabilistic at the most fundamental level? • Are there non-local correlations in nature? • Are non-causal interconnections between physical systems possible?
Abstract The development of quantum theory was driven by a consistently repeated failure of classical physics to accommodate the results of ever more sophisticated experiments on the microphysical world of radiation, elementary particles, atoms, and molecules. Each break-through in the development of the theory’s conceptual structure was followed (sometimes very rapidly) by new experimental data that just did not fit, pointing to the need for yet further refinements. As is typical in such a radical change in the approach to acquiring scientific understanding, old and often unsuitable concepts were forced into service to meet the needs of the new description. Confusion reigned. The major figures in the theory’s early development took up radically different positions on the theory’s interpretation, and, as we will see, the debate became polarized in ways that remain relevant today.
The origin of the idea of rationality as a fundamental model of human behaviour (the concept of homo oeconomicus) that was introduced during the neoclassical revolution in economics and that implied the mathematization of economics thereby adopting the mathematical scheme of and borrowing some fundamental conception from classical mechanics, as well as the crisis of this rationality model that followed in the latest decades are here discussed. The origin of the least action principle in 18th century is first described. The least action principle was the basis that lead to the development of Lagrangean dynamics in classical mechanics that, on its turn, entered economics in 19th century as a fundamental method to describe the behaviour of a postulated rational agent and was the basis for the development of mainstream economics in 20th century. The epistemologically unjustified transfer of concepts from mechanics, in particular in Walras? work, is stressed. In the second half of 20th century experimental psychology slowly entered economics and several paradoxes in the real agents? choices were shown giving strong evidence of rationality?s axioms violation in the real behaviour of people. By mid-20th century, quantum mechanics had already developed a highly effective mathematical apparatus to describe the wave-particle behaviour of quantum objects and in particular the phenomenon of probability interference that is clearly shown in the double-slit experiment with single electrons, as well as with photons. Probability interference is peculiar to quantum mechanics and is extraneous to the Kolmogorov axiomatic theory of classical probability. The recent idea of applying the quantum mechanics concepts and formalism, including quantum probability interference and superposition of states, to the description of mental processes is discussed. The aim of this new field of research, which is developing along the lines of the centuries-old question of the mind-body relation, is to create a general framework where cognition might be modeled. Quantum cognition is therefore introduced as a possible answer to the rationality violation paradoxes shown by experiments on ambiguous figures recognition and on the effects brought about by conjunction and disjunction of concepts.