Physics of Life Reviews 2017-06-29

Modeling human behavior in economics and social science

M. Dolfin, L. Leonida, N. Outada

Index: 10.1016/j.plrev.2017.06.026

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Abstract

The complex interactions between human behaviors and social economic sciences is critically analyzed in this paper in view of possible applications of mathematical modeling as an attainable interdisciplinary approach to understand and simulate the aforementioned dynamics. The quest is developed along three steps: Firstly an overall analysis of social and economic sciences indicates the main requirements that a contribution of mathematical modeling should bring to these sciences; subsequently the focus moves to an overview of mathematical tools and to the selection of those which appear, according to the authors bias, appropriate to the modeling; finally, a survey of applications is presented looking ahead to research perspectives.