"Market forces, ecology and evolution: What have physicists accomplished?" by Prof Doyne Farmer & Dr Mark Buchanan

Past Event

Date
04 June 2013, 6:30pm - 8:00pm

Location
St Hilda's College
Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Image Credit: Piotr Zarobkiewicz

This event is being hosted by the Institute of Physics, Nonlinear and Complex Physics Group

Speakers:

  • Professor Doyne Farmer, Co-Director, Complexity Economics, INET@Oxford
  • Dr Mark Buchanan, Physicist and author of “Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics

Summary for Prof Farmer's talk: What have physicists accomplished in economics?

Since roughly the mid 90's there has been an invasion of physicists into economics, and finance in particular. In this talk I will give an idiosyncratic review of what physicists have accomplished since then. I will argue that the biggest differences are epistemological, i.e. in the questions that are asked, how they are answered, the type of solutions that are considered useful, and the type of assumptions that are considered plausible. I will present an overview of the main accomplishments, but focusing on a few areas, in particular order flow and market impact. Time permitting I will make some remarks about high frequency trading: In particular I will argue that having a proper understanding of market impact can be used to show that obtaining good position in the limit order book is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally, and that simply changing the rules for execution easily eliminates this.

Please register for the event at http://tinyurl.com/bugeyzt