Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 225, 3115-3119 (2016)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60176-3

Regular Article

Absence of economic and social constants

¹ Economics area, Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, Gujarat-380015, India
² School of Economics, Ashoka University, Kundli, Haryana 131029, India

^a e-mail: anindyac@iima.ac.in.
^b e-mail: ratul.lahkar@ashoka.edu.in.

Received: 9 June 2016
Revised: 14 September 2016
Published online: 22 December 2016

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the possibility of economics as a discipline emulating the success of hard sciences. In our view, a fundamental obstacle arises from the fact that economics does not have (m)any stable and robust laws governing economic systems that hold true irrespective of the source of data. One possible but untested way to introduce some of the evolving features of large scale economic systems, e.g. out-of-equilibrium dynamics and finite rationality, is evolutionary game theory.