Abstract Microeconomics represents the most formally formalized branch of the social sciences. Yet its core actor—the rational agent endowed with complete and consistent preferences, who maximizes a well-defined utility function without hesitation—does not exist in laboratory experiments, market transactions or real household decision-making. Behavioral economics has dismantled this myth, only to replace it with a disjoint catalogue of separate “effects” and “anomalies”: different effects yield contradictory predictions, and researchers select effects ex post to rationalize all observed outcomes. A discipline that explains everything case by case can barely generate ex ante predictions. This monograph is the first work worldwide to systematically reconstruct quantum microeconomics. Human preferences and beliefs possess a mathematical structure isomorphic to quantum states: prior to a decision, alternative options coexist in superposition; choice constitutes a measurement that constructs preferences; question order alters responses because judgments correspond to incompatible observables; interacting individuals become mutually entangled. Framing effects, order effects, preference reversals and herding behavior are no longer a mere inventory of biases, but predictable signatures emerging from a unified underlying process. This book does not argue that the human brain operates as a physical quantum machine. It posits instead that the mathematical structure of human choice is isomorphic to quantum statesarXiv. The book is organized into six parts. Part I, Paradigm Revolution, diagnoses the century-long crisis of the classical paradigm, traces its mechanistic legacy from Newton to Walras, establishes the philosophical foundations of practical ontology and observation dependence, puts forward the quantum agent hypothesis, and assembles the analytical framework for the entire volume. Part II develops quantum consumer theory, reconstructing preferences, utility, choice, demand and welfare measurement on the basis of superposition. Part III builds quantum producer theory, covering production, costs, supply, the theory of the firm, and profit maximization. Part IV addresses quantum market structure and game theory, treating perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly and games as entangled quantum systems. Part V reconstructs quantum general equilibrium and market failure, including general equilibrium theory, welfare economics, externalities, public goods and asymmetric information. Part VI extends the framework to factor markets for labor, capital and land, synthesizes behavioral microeconomics, and charts future disciplinary frontiers. The book balances unity and depth, originality and rigor, formal rigor and readability. Within an axiomatic framework, it derives core macroeconomic phenomena from a small set of quantum principles. Each chapter contains original theoretical construction, formal mathematical derivation and real-world applications, with purpose-built diagrams to substantiate arguments. This volume is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers, policy practitioners, and all readers who seek to understand why economies boom and collapse.
Abstract Microeconomics represents the most formally formalized branch of the social sciences. Yet its core actor—the rational agent endowed with complete and consistent preferences, who maximizes a well-defined utility function without hesitation—does not exist in laboratory experiments, market transactions or real household decision-making. Behavioral economics has dismantled this myth, only to replace it with a disjoint catalogue of separate “effects” and “anomalies”: different effects yield contradictory predictions, and researchers select effects ex post to rationalize all observed outcomes. A discipline that explains everything case by case can barely generate ex ante predictions. This monograph is the first work worldwide to systematically reconstruct quantum microeconomics. Human preferences and beliefs possess a mathematical structure isomorphic to quantum states: prior to a decision, alternative options coexist in superposition; choice constitutes a measurement that constructs preferences; question order alters responses because judgments correspond to incompatible observables; interacting individuals become mutually entangled. Framing effects, order effects, preference reversals and herding behavior are no longer a mere inventory of biases, but predictable signatures emerging from a unified underlying process. This book does not argue that the human brain operates as a physical quantum machine. It posits instead that the mathematical structure of human choice is isomorphic to quantum statesarXiv. The book is organized into six parts. Part I, Paradigm Revolution, diagnoses the century-long crisis of the classical paradigm, traces its mechanistic legacy from Newton to Walras, establishes the philosophical foundations of practical ontology and observation dependence, puts forward the quantum agent hypothesis, and assembles the analytical framework for the entire volume. Part II develops quantum consumer theory, reconstructing preferences, utility, choice, demand and welfare measurement on the basis of superposition. Part III builds quantum producer theory, covering production, costs, supply, the theory of the firm, and profit maximization. Part IV addresses quantum market structure and game theory, treating perfect competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, oligopoly and games as entangled quantum systems. Part V reconstructs quantum general equilibrium and market failure, including general equilibrium theory, welfare economics, externalities, public goods and asymmetric information. Part VI extends the framework to factor markets for labor, capital and land, synthesizes behavioral microeconomics, and charts future disciplinary frontiers. The book balances unity and depth, originality and rigor, formal rigor and readability. Within an axiomatic framework, it derives core macroeconomic phenomena from a small set of quantum principles. Each chapter contains original theoretical construction, formal mathematical derivation and real-world applications, with purpose-built diagrams to substantiate arguments. This volume is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers, policy practitioners, and all readers who seek to understand why economies boom and collapse.
Abstract This is the world’s first general-audience work to systematically rewrite the underlying logic of economics through quantum thinking. Since Adam Smith, economics has rested on the foundation of Newtonian mechanism: human beings are rational atoms skilled at calculation, resources are scarce stocks with fixed attributes, prices tend toward equilibrium, and markets clear automatically. Yet the rise of behavioral economics shattered the myth of homo economicus, and the 2008 financial crisis, platform economies, free goods, asset-price bubbles, and the repeated tug-of-war between inflation and expectations have again and again exposed the limits of the classical framework’s explanatory power. The problem is not that a particular conclusion needs patching; it is that the entire worldview needs updating. This book argues that what quantum mechanics contributes to economics is not a set of fashionable metaphors, but a rigorous intellectual structure for handling multiple coexisting possibilities, observation that participates in generation, relations that precede entities, and a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. From this perspective, resources are probability clouds of possibility waiting to be activated by cognition, and scarcity is the result of observational collapse; human nature is a superposition of the rational and the irrational; decision-making is measurement rather than revelation; supply and demand are mutually entangled, and prices oscillate around coherent states rather than settling at static equilibrium; money is an entangled carrier of trust, and institutions are the coherent emergence of economic systems. The book consists of an introduction and six parts comprising forty-two chapters. Part I accomplishes the worldview leap from Newton to the quantum; Part II reinterprets individual choice and cost; Part III dissects the entanglement mechanism of supply, demand, and price; Part IV examines money, cycles, and market networks; Part V rebuilds the theory of value and welfare; Part VI leads to the emergent landscape of property rights, policy, and institutional civilization. Each chapter follows a “break before build” approach: first dismantling a widely held classical myth, then offering a more explanatory answer within the quantum framework, supplemented by real cases spanning ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign history, thought experiments, comparative charts, and chapter-end key takeaways, discussion questions, and further reading. With masterful and penetrating prose, the author makes cutting-edge theory accessible and compelling. Whether you are a researcher or graduate student in economics, management, finance, or decision science, or a general reader hoping to see through the workings of wealth, markets, and society, this book will change the lenses through which you view the world—afterward, the economic world will never look the same.
Since its emergence in the 1970s, behavioral economics has integrated psychological insights into economics—drawing on Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, Thaler's psychological accounting and boost theory, and Schiller's behavioral finance—thereby dismantling the myth of the "homo economicus" and revealing systematic cognitive biases inherent to human decision-making. However, classical behavioral economics has been constructed from a collection of fragmented "effects" and "biases," lacking a unified, axiomatic mathematical framework; moreover, the frequent practice among researchers to selectively apply individual effects has undermined the discipline's predictive power and theoretical coherence. This book is the first academic monograph in the world to systematically expound on quantum behavioral economics—a new paradigm devised specifically to overcome this fundamental dilemma. It introduces concepts such as Hilbert spaces, state vectors, superposition, entanglement, measurement collapse, quantum probability, interference effects, unitary evolution, decoherence, non-commutative observables, and quantum phase transitions into the foundational bedrock of behavioral economics: that preferences and beliefs coexist in a superposition prior to decision-making; that decision-making consists of constructing measurements to extract definite preferences via measurement collapse; and that the beliefs and behaviors of individuals are entangled, exhibiting non-local quantum correlations. Furthermore, it posits that the sequence in which information is presented and the framing effects are intrinsic properties of quantum decision-making—rather than mere "biases." This book comprises six parts and thirty chapters: Part I, "Paradigm Revolution," establishes the philosophical foundations, the quantum subject hypothesis, and the analytical framework; Part II develops quantum probabilistic judgments, quantum heuristics, quantum prospect theory, quantum decision-making under uncertainty, and quantum framing effects; Part III explores quantum preferences, quantum utility, quantum choice theory, quantum endowment effects and loss aversion, as well as the current state of quantum research and default effects; Part IV extends the scope to quantum social preferences, quantum altruism, quantum trust and cooperation, quantum game theory, and quantum public goods games; Part V examines quantum intertemporal choice, quantum hyperbolic discounting, quantum self-control, quantum procrastination and addiction, and quantum habit formation and behavioral change across temporal dimensions; Part VI demonstrates the application of framing in finance, markets, public policy, and health domains, while offering insights into the future of this discipline. This work pursues three overarching objectives: theoretical unification and depth, originality and authority, and seamless readability. It is intended for graduate students, faculty, and researchers in behavioral economics, decision science, psychology, and finance, as well as for public policy makers and practitioners in financial markets to provide new paradigm-based analytical tools.
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.
Abstract Foundations of Quantum Economics unfolds a coherent theoretical thread, replacing the rational-agent premise of mainstream economics with the quantum-person hypothesis: before observation, decision-makers sustain multiple conflicting options encoded in probability amplitudes, and a decision corresponds to collapse triggered by measurement. The book first lays cognitive and mathematical foundations, demonstrating that human judgement inherently exhibits quantum features including superposition, interference and order dependence. Classical probability theory fails for non-commutative economic events, making Hilbert spaces and probability amplitudes indispensable languages for economic inquiry. It then reconstructs causality, information, uncertainty and risk, arguing that economic causes are not uniquely fixed before the collapse of consensus; uncertainty is endogenous to the system, and risk represents the spread of superposed distributions rather than exogenous noise. Built upon this architecture, the work revisits core microeconomic notions such as value, utility, game interaction, supply and demand, property rights, institutions and innovation. All conventional theories are recovered as special limits under zero interference and single eigenstates, while superposition and entanglement furnish fresh explanatory power for economic anomalies. The analysis further expands into macroeconomics, interpreting growth, business cycles, money, fiscal policy, trade and welfare as coherent superposition, phase transition and collapse of collective cognition and consensus, and concludes with the renovation of econometrics and economic governance. The book’s central thesis holds that superposition, interference, observation and collapse are not metaphors borrowed from quantum physics, but intrinsic properties of human cognition and economic practice. Economic realities are not predetermined facts waiting to be discovered; instead, they are generated through human cognition, consensus and practice in the act of measurement. Quantum economics is far more than a cosmetic revision of existing models. It constitutes a shift of research programme, abandoning Laplacian determinism and reconceiving the economy as an open, generative process. The book articulates five interconnected layers: the quantum person as ontological starting point, quantum features of cognition, superposition of collective consensus, endogenous uncertainty, and quantuminformed governance. It reminds researchers and policymakers that economic observation and policy intervention are performative, capable of reshaping the very system they examine. Economics abandons the pursuit of a single, determinate optimum and embraces endogenous uncertainty; policymakers cease to be omniscient system engineers and become prudent stewards of consensus and designers of measurement bases. This volume establishes the unified bedrock for the whole quantum economics series and calls for a new, more honest and realistic economics embedded within the economic process itself.
Abstract Finance stands as the most quantitatively advanced branch of the social sciences, yet it is also the most humbling. The mean-variance efficient frontier, the CAPM, arbitrage pricing relations, the Black–Scholes–Merton option formula and the efficient market hypothesis possess unparalleled formal elegance, yet they suffered a broad empirical refutation in the global financial crisis of 2008. Standard models understate tail risk, misinterpret the comovement of assets that are supposed to diversify risk, and presuppose liquidity and rationality — two features that vanish precisely when they are most needed. Behavioural finance has documented an extensive catalogue of cognitive biases, yet it remains a patchwork of isolated effects without a unified calculus of probability. This monograph is the first systematic work to establish quantum finance. It argues that the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics supplies this missing unified structure: financial states are state vectors in Hilbert space; beliefs and valuations coexist as superposed amplitudes; trading and information disclosure act as measurements that collapse states in accordance with the Born rule; assets and markets are entangled with one another; and path interference generates fat tails and herding, which are inadmissible under classical additive probability. The book comprises six parts and thirty chapters in total. Part I lays the philosophical and formal foundations. Starting from the paradigm crisis, it proceeds through quantum probability and quantum stochastic processes to construct the analytical framework built on three core pillars of quantum finance. Part II develops quantum asset pricing, covering the quantum CAPM, quantum APT, quantum option pricing and the term structure of interest rates. Part III advances quantum risk management, including quantum risk measures, Value-at-Risk (VaR) and expected shortfall, stress testing, credit risk and phase transitions in systemic risk. Part IV addresses quantum portfolios and asset allocation, ranging from the quantum meanvariance frontier, strategic and tactical asset allocation, to factor investing and hedge fund strategies. Part V turns to market microstructure and behavioural finance, examining quantum order flows, marketmaker liquidity, quantum prospect theory and market sentiment. Part VI looks ahead to frontier avenues: quantum computational optimization, quantum machine learning, blockchains, postquantum cryptography and quantuminformed financial regulation. This book rigorously recovers the classical CAPM, efficient market hypothesis and Gaussian risk models as special cases under decoherence limits. It is intended for graduate students and faculty in finance and financial engineering, as well as researchers and practitioners working on asset pricing, risk management, portfolio allocation and financial regulation.