[citation needed] One driving force behind econophysics arising at this time was the sudden availability of large amounts of financial data, starting in the 1980s.
[citation needed] The term "econophysics" was coined by H. Eugene Stanley, to describe the large number of papers written by physicists in the problems of (stock and other) markets, in a conference on statistical physics in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) in 1995 and first appeared in its proceedings publication in Physica A 1996.
[5] The almost regular meeting series on the topic include: Econophys-Kolkata (held in Kolkata & Delhi),[6] Econophysics Colloquium, ESHIA/ WEHIA.
In recent years network science, heavily reliant on analogies from statistical mechanics, has been applied to the study of productive systems.
[9] The fluctuation-dissipation theorem connects the two to establish a concrete correspondence of "temperature", "entropy", "free potential/energy", and other physics notions to an economics system.
[13] Nobel laureate and founder of experimental economics Vernon L. Smith has used econophysics to model sociability via implementation of ideas in Humanomics.
There, noisy decision making and interaction parameters that facilitate the social action responses of reward and punishment result in spin glass models identical to those in physics.
Moreover, the authors conclude that the classification derived from the complexity-entropy causality plane is consistent with the qualifications assigned by major rating companies to the sovereign instruments.
A similar study developed by Bariviera et al.[16] explore the relationship between credit ratings and informational efficiency of a sample of corporate bonds of US oil and energy companies using also the complexity–entropy causality plane.
Econophysics is having some impacts on the more applied field of quantitative finance, whose scope and aims significantly differ from those of economic theory.
[20][30][31] Presently, one of the main results of econophysics comprises the explanation of the "fat tails" in the distribution of many kinds of financial data as a universal self-similar scaling property (i.e. scale invariant over many orders of magnitude in the data),[32] arising from the tendency of individual market competitors, or of aggregates of them, to exploit systematically and optimally the prevailing "microtrends" (e.g., rising or falling prices).
[33] It appears that it also plays a role that near a change of the tendency (e.g. from falling to rising prices) there are typical "panic reactions" of the selling or buying agents with algebraically increasing bargain rapidities and volumes.
In 2006 economists Mauro Gallegati, Steve Keen, Thomas Lux, and Paul Ormerod, published a critique of econophysics.