2. Statistical Physics for the Digital Economy

Workshop organized by: T. Aste, G. Caldarelli, T. Di Matteo and G. Livan

For more information please visit the web page
Statistical Physics for the Digital Economy

The last few years have seen the emergence of novel and entirely digital forms of economic exchange. Indeed, we have witnessed the emergence of sharing economy marketplaces where individuals can share goods and resources in real time, peer-to-peer financial services, as well as the creation of a purely digital currency such as Bitcoin [1-3].

The common trait of such disruptive innovations is that they all rely on decentralized distributed networks of users who voluntarily participate. In this respect, these cannot be regarded as anything other than large interacting systems, where individual choices scale to collective consequences. This is precisely the realm of application of Statistical Physics, where the laws describing macroscopic behavior acquire a statistical nature, which loses its dependence on the details of the local interactions as the system size increases. Over the last few years, the methods of Statistical Physics have had tremendous success in describing phenomena lying outside the conventional realm of Physics. Up to now, some of the most fruitful applications have focused precisely on network phenomena, ranging from the spread of epidemics to subjects that had been exclusively investigated in Economics and in the Social Sciences, such as stock markets or social networks.    
    
This workshop aims at bringing together a pool of experts in the interdisciplinary Statistical Physics community to outline, explore, discuss and address the challenges posed by the growth of the digital economy, and to identify the research channels where Statistical Physics could play a key role in delivering relevant quantitative findings.    
    
[1] S. Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf, 2008)    

[2] F. Caccioli, G. Livan, T. Aste, Scalability and Egalitarianism in Peer-to-Peer Networks (Banking Beyond Money and Banks, 2016)    

[3] http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/   

Invited speakears: