Quantum Economic Philosophy takes the quantumlike features inherent in human cognition as its starting point, reconstructing economic philosophy to rethink and transcend the mechanistic worldview that has long dominated economic thought. It reworks the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of economics through quantum logic, breaking away from the constraints of classical substance ontology. Within this new framework, economic agents are no longer isolated, selfcontained atomic individuals but relational nodes embedded within networks; economic states are not predetermined objective facts waiting passively to be documented, but a set of coexisting, superposed potentialities. Economic observation is not a detached, neutral act of recording; rather, observation, together with the observer’s expectations and actions, actively participates in shaping the economic reality under investigation. Adopting a practical ontology, this book reinterprets core categories including value, capital, markets and economic justice. It unpacks the implicit metaphysical presuppositions embedded within mainstream economics, and clarifies that the quantum turn is not merely rhetorical borrowing from quantum physics. Instead, it constitutes a fundamental paradigm shift suited to the endogenous reflexivity, uncertainty and generative character of economic systems. Balancing rigorous philosophical inquiry with theoretical extensibility for economics, this volume is written for students, researchers and thinkers working in economics, economic philosophy and social theory. It strips away the a priori assumptions built into the conventional equilibrium paradigm, lays a coherent and unified conceptual foundation for the entire quantum economics book series, and furnishes a fresh philosophical vocabulary for re-examining economic order, human choice and institutional evolution.
Quantum Economic Philosophy takes the quantumlike features inherent in human cognition as its starting point, reconstructing economic philosophy to rethink and transcend the mechanistic worldview that has long dominated economic thought. It reworks the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of economics through quantum logic, breaking away from the constraints of classical substance ontology. Within this new framework, economic agents are no longer isolated, selfcontained atomic individuals but relational nodes embedded within networks; economic states are not predetermined objective facts waiting passively to be documented, but a set of coexisting, superposed potentialities. Economic observation is not a detached, neutral act of recording; rather, observation, together with the observer’s expectations and actions, actively participates in shaping the economic reality under investigation. Adopting a practical ontology, this book reinterprets core categories including value, capital, markets and economic justice. It unpacks the implicit metaphysical presuppositions embedded within mainstream economics, and clarifies that the quantum turn is not merely rhetorical borrowing from quantum physics. Instead, it constitutes a fundamental paradigm shift suited to the endogenous reflexivity, uncertainty and generative character of economic systems. Balancing rigorous philosophical inquiry with theoretical extensibility for economics, this volume is written for students, researchers and thinkers working in economics, economic philosophy and social theory. It strips away the a priori assumptions built into the conventional equilibrium paradigm, lays a coherent and unified conceptual foundation for the entire quantum economics book series, and furnishes a fresh philosophical vocabulary for re-examining economic order, human choice and institutional evolution.
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 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.
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 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 the establishment of von Neumann and Nash's concept of equilibrium, game theory has become a universal language in economics and social sciences. However, classical game theory is deeply rooted in the mechanistic worldview, and its deterministic assumptions, static equilibrium, and individualistic methodology are becoming increasingly inadequate in explaining the emergence of cooperation, uncertainty, and complex social interactions. This book directly faces this dilemma and introduces the core concepts of quantum mechanics into game analysis, constructing a complete system of quantum game theory. Starting from the century long evolution of game theory, the entire book deeply criticizes the mechanistic nature of classical game theory, and re establishes the philosophical foundation of game theory through practical ontology. On this basis, this book proposes the hypothesis of a "quantum gamer" and constructs a complete analytical framework from superposition strategy space, quantum entanglement to measurement collapse. The system reconstructs core areas such as quantum zero sum games, quantum non-zero sum games, quantum prisoner's dilemma, quantum coordination games, quantum evolutionary games, quantum cooperative games, and quantum incomplete information games, and extends them to cutting-edge directions such as quantum repetitive games, quantum game learning, and quantum mechanism design. At the application level, this book comprehensively demonstrates the broad prospects of quantum game theory in fields such as economics, political science, sociology, biology, computer science, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and ethics. This book emphasizes that quantum entanglement enables cooperation to emerge, and quantum measurement leads equilibrium from static to dynamic collapse, thus surpassing the explanatory boundaries of classical game theory. The book has a rigorous structure and in-depth arguments, combining theoretical originality with interdisciplinary perspectives, providing a groundbreaking work for researchers, graduate students, and cutting-edge explorers to understand the quantum game revolution.