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The necessity of multi-disciplinary scholarship for finance: On Ayache and Roffe

Review products

Ayache Elie, The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 414 pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-137-28654-3
Roffe Jon, Abstract Market Theory, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 180 pp., $100.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-137-51174-4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Timothy C. Johnson
Timothy C. Johnson*
Affiliation:
Heriot-Watt University, UK
*
Corresponding author: Timothy C. Johnson, Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Ayache presents a view of markets and mathematics that attempts to conform to the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. However, this attempt is unsuccessful because Ayache adopts a view of probability rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions that cannot accommodate the radical uncertainty of the markets. This is unfortunate as it is reasonable to believe that the ideas of Badiou and Meillassoux, when synthesised with contemporary ideas of probability, could offer interesting insights. Roffe presents a better argued synthesis of Deleuze and markets, however he makes similar assumptions about contemporary probability that undermine his conclusions.

Keywords

Derivative pricingfinancial mathematicsprobabilityuncertaintycontingency
Type
Review forum
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 2 , Issue 2: Art and finance , 2016 , pp. 189 - 204
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Copyright
© 2016 The Author(s)

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