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JEBO Conference



May 20, 2008

JMU’s College of Business Holds International Conference on Economics


Cars H. Hommes and Akio Matsumoto speaking at JEBO conference reception The speaker roster reads like a nomination list for a Nobel Prize. An international assemblage of the world’s leading experts in economic complexity converged at James Madison University’s College of Business May 16-17, for a conference, “Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Economic Complexity.”

The program was sponsored by JMU’s College of Business and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO). Dr. J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., professor of economics and the Kirby L. Cramer, Jr. Professor of Business Administration at James Madison University, is the journal’s editor and the conference organizer. A subset of the papers
Cars H. Hommes, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Akio Matsumoto, Chuo University, Japan, were among an elite group of speakers at the JEBO conference on economic complexity.
presented will appear in a special issue of the journal later this year, says Rosser, who has edited the journal at JMU’s College of Business since 2001.

Complexity is a hot topic, says Rosser, describing the trend of economic analytics across disciplines. “Go back 50 years, and people were talking about multi-disciplinary economics in which people fully involved in each discipline were getting together and interacting. About 30 years ago, people were talking about inter-disciplinary economics, where they were combining aspects of different disciplines. We are pushing this broader, newer idea of transdisciplinary economics, seeking to more fully take advantage of each discipline, but to integrate the disciplines in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

Experts in the areas of mathematics, physics and economics from Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Italy and other European countries came together to discuss and debate around the theme of complexity.

Barkley and Marina Rosser at JEBO conferneceJMU Provost Douglas Brown and Jeroen Loos, publisher of JEBO at its headquarters in Amsterdam, welcomed speakers and guests. Dr. Barkley Rosser gave the closing presentation, “Is a Transdisciplinary Perspective on Economic Complexity Possible?”

Speakers are as follows:
Alan P. Kirman, professor of economics at the University of Aix-Marseille, France.
Robert Axtell, professor and acting director of the Center for Social Complexity and Computational Social Science at George Mason University, US.
Barkley Rosser and Marina Rosser introduce speakers and topics at the JEBO conference held at JMU in May. Both are professors of economics at JMU's College of Business.

Rosario N. Mantegna, professor of applied physics at the University of Palermo, Italy, and founder of econo-physics as a concept.
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, professor of condensed physics at CEA-Seclay, France;
Editor of Quantitative Finance.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson, professor of business studies and director of the Centre for Research on Institutional Economics at the University of Hertfordshire, UK; founder and editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics.
Philip Mirowski, professor of economics and fellow of the Reilly Institute of Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame, US.
Duncan K. Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics in the graduate faculty at New School University, US.
Tönu Puu, professor of economics and founder and first Director of Center for Regional Science at Umea University, Sweden.
Laura Gardini, professor of mathematical economics at the University of Urbino, Italy.
Akio Matsumoto, professor of economics and associate dean, faculty of social sciences at Chuo University, Japan.
Mauro Gallegati, professor of economics at the Technical University of Marche, Italy;
founder and first president of the Society for the Economic Science of Heterogeneous Interacting Agents.
Cars H. Hommes, professor of economics and founder and director of the
Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., professor of economics and Kirby L. Cramer, Jr. Professor of Business Administration at James Madison University, US; editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Read about the conference on this Center for Science Writings blog, published by John Horgan, former senior writer for Scientific American magazine.