Quantum Social Science

Abstract

Written by world experts in the foundations of quantum mechanics and its applications to social science, this book shows how elementary quantum mechanical principles can be applied to decision-making paradoxes in psychology and used in modelling information in finance and economics. The book starts with a thorough overview of some of the salient differences between classical, statistical and quantum mechanics. It presents arguments on why quantum mechanics can be applied outside of physics and defines quantum social science. The issue of the existence of quantum probabilistic effects in psychology, economics and finance is addressed and basic questions and answers are provided. Aimed at researchers in economics and psychology, as well as physics, basic mathematical preliminaries and elementary concepts from quantum mechanics are defined in a self-contained way.

A Quantum-Like View to a Generalized Two Players Game

“…5) where , is the scalar product in H. As we have discussed in [4], these states are useful to project from quantum to classical dynamics and to fix the initial conditions of the considered system.…”

The role of information in a two-traders market

“…Those paradoxes lie at the base of many economics/finance models. We document those achievements in [16]. In essence, the use of quantum mechanical techniques into social science revolve really around formalizing information.…”

“…There are other interesting arguments, such as the way hidden variable theory can connect with the (non-observable) state prices, in again, the non-arbitrage theorem. See [16] Finally, we also want to mention that in the context of decision theory, notably in the resolving of some expected utility paradoxes, the use of quantum probability is very promising. Those paradoxes lie at the base of many economics/finance models.…”

Quantum-like models cannot account for the conjunction fallacy

“…The quantum-like account of the conjunction fallacy is particularly promising as it belongs to a more general theoretical framework of quantum-like modeling in cognition and decision making, which has been applied to many fallacies or human behavior considered as irrational (for reviews, see Pothos and Busemeyer 2013;Ashtiani andAzgomi 2015, or Bruza et al 2015; textbooks include Busemeyer and Bruza 2012;Haven and Khrennikov 2013). For instance, quantum-like models of judgments have been proposed to account for order effect, i. e. when the answers given to two questions depend on the order of presentation of these questions (Atmanspacher and Römer 2012;Busemeyer and Bruza 2012;Wang and Busemeyer 2013;Wang et al 2014); for the violation of the sure thing principle, which states that if an agent prefers choosing action A-B under a specific state of the world and also prefers choosing A-B in the complementary state, then she should choose A over B regardless of the state of the world (Busemeyer et al 2006a, b;Busemeyer and Wang 2007;Khrennikov and Haven 2009; for Ellsberg's paradox (Ellsberg 1961) more specifically, cf.…”