Foreword

Summary

This new book by Emmanuel Haven and Andrei Khrennikov argues that information processing in social systems can to a degree be formalized with the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics. This is a novel approach. Understanding decision making is a central objective of economics and finance and the quantum like approach proposed here, is used as a tool to enrich the formalism of such decision making. Emmanuel and Andrei argue for instance that probability interference can be used to explain the violation of the law of total probability in well known paradoxes like the Ellsberg decision making paradox.

Emmanuel and Andrei's book forms one of the very first contributions in a very novel area of research. I hope this book can open the road for many new books to come. More new results are needed, especially in the area of decision making.

H. Eugene Stanley

William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor;

Professor of Physics; Professor of Chemistry;

Professor of Biomedical Engineering;

Professor of Physiology (School of Medicine)

Director, Center for Polymer Studies,

Department of Physics, Boston University

By chance a few days before Andrei Khrennikov and Emmanuel Haven asked me to write this Foreword to their new book Quantum Social Science, I was browsing the collected works of Wolfgang Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, eds. Charles P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn, Springer (1994).