47,049 research outputs found
The real bills doctrine
An abstract for this article is not available.Money theory
Actual and perceived inflation
The concept of inflation perceived by consumers came in the recent debate on inflation since it may affect consumer behaviour even if the perception was completely wrong. A misperception of inflation occurs particularly when households tend to label incorrectly inflation what really is a reduction in their disposable income, as in declining or stagnant economies and during public budget consolidation processes. Also a cash changeover may alter the perception of price changes. Nevertheless, even in a perfect perception framework, each consumer evaluates the inflation rate taking into account only his own consumption basket and the dynamics of the particular prices he pays. Hence, perceived inflation may differ systematically from the official one calculated by the statistical agencies, that necessarily make use of a common basket of consumption and the average market price of each product. The official inflation rate may be either beyond or below the average individual inflation rate in accordance with the sign of the covariance between individual budget shares and the corresponding price changes. Since economic theory suggests that the latter sign is positive under price discrimination, inflation faced by consumers is often higher than the official one. As far as the perceived inflation is strictly related to the cost of living, an aggregation fallacy may bias downward the estimation of official consumer price indices. At variance, just under price discrimination, firms tend to perceive an inflation rate very close to the official one, or even smaller. The arguments above provide a number of testable consequences.Aggregation fallacy; Inflation measurement; Perceived inflation; Price discrimination
Concepts and Their Dynamics: A Quantum-Theoretic Modeling of Human Thought
We analyze different aspects of our quantum modeling approach of human
concepts, and more specifically focus on the quantum effects of contextuality,
interference, entanglement and emergence, illustrating how each of them makes
its appearance in specific situations of the dynamics of human concepts and
their combinations. We point out the relation of our approach, which is based
on an ontology of a concept as an entity in a state changing under influence of
a context, with the main traditional concept theories, i.e. prototype theory,
exemplar theory and theory theory. We ponder about the question why quantum
theory performs so well in its modeling of human concepts, and shed light on
this question by analyzing the role of complex amplitudes, showing how they
allow to describe interference in the statistics of measurement outcomes, while
in the traditional theories statistics of outcomes originates in classical
probability weights, without the possibility of interference. The relevance of
complex numbers, the appearance of entanglement, and the role of Fock space in
explaining contextual emergence, all as unique features of the quantum
modeling, are explicitly revealed in this paper by analyzing human concepts and
their dynamics.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure
Monetary economics from econophysics perspective
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The
European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a
Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the
author from theoretical physics to economics. It briefly summarizes
applications of statistical physics to monetary transactions in an ensemble of
economic agents. It shows how a highly unequal probability distribution of
money emerges due to irreversible increase of entropy in the system. The second
part examines deep conceptual and controversial issues and fallacies in
monetary economics from econophysics perspective. These issues include the
nature of money, conservation (or not) of money, distinctions between money vs.
wealth and money vs. debt, creation of money by the state and debt by the
banks, the origins of monetary crises and capitalist profit. Presentation uses
plain language understandable to laypeople and may be of interest to both
specialists and general public.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur
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