Human decision making by professionals trading daily in the stock market can be a daunting task. It includes decisions on whether to keep on investing or to exit a market subject to huge price swings, and how to price in news or rumors attributed to a specific stock. The question then arises how...

This paper introduces a theoretical framework for collective decision making to describe fluctuations and transitions in financial markets. Investors are assumed to be boundedly rational, using a limited set of information including past price history and expectation on future dividends....

We use insight from a model of earth techtonic plate movement to obtain a new understanding of the build up and release of stress in the price dynamics of the world's stock exchanges. Nonlinearity enters the model due to a behavioral attribute of humans reacting disproportionately to big...

Since the attribution of the Nobel prize in 2002 to Kahneman for prospect theory, behavioral finance has become an increasingly important subfield of finance. However the main parts of behavioral finance, prospect theory included, understand financial markets through individual investment...

Here we introduce the idea of using rational expectations, a core concept in economics and finance, as a tool to predict the optimal failure time for a wide class of weighted k-out-of-n reliability systems. We illustrate the concept by applying it to systems that have components with...

It is hard to overstate the importance that the concept of symmetry has had in every field of physics, a fact alluded to by the Nobel Prize winner P.W. Anderson, who once wrote that “physics is the study of symmetry”. Whereas the idea of symmetry is widely used in science in general, very...

We introduce a new methodology that enables detection of the onset of convergence towards Nash equilibria in simple repeated games with infinitely large strategy spaces, thereby revealing the heuristics used in decision-making. The method works by constraining on a special finite subset of...

We introduce a non-linear pricing model of individual stock returns that defines a ”stickiness” parameter of the returns. The pricing model resembles the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) used in finance but has a non-linear component inspired from models of earth quake tectonic plate...

It is suggested to consider long term trends of financial markets as a growth phenomenon. The question that is asked is what conditions are needed for a long term sustainable growth or contraction in a financial market? The paper discuss the role of traditional market players of long only mutual...