| The insights into complex system behavior provided by theoretical physicists may potentially increase our understanding of the dynamics of modern economies. Motivated by the ongoing growth crisis and the inability of current economic models to identify causal mechanisms and phase transitions, this dissertation a) reviews the historical relationship between economics and physics, as well as a relevant sample of the physics literature on coupling, synchronization and related fields and these methods' incursion into economics; b) utilizes one of these coupled oscillator models in an attempt to explain macroeconomic data; and, c) explores the value of this same connectivity network-driven synchronization model for explaining the transitional dynamics of a multiple resource variant of the Minority Game. |
