Economics and Finance: q-Statistical Stylized Features Galore

Abstract

The Boltzmann–Gibbs (BG) entropy and its associated statistical mechanics were generalized, three decades ago, on the basis of the nonadditive entropy S q ( q ∈ R ), which recovers the BG entropy in the q → 1 limit. The optimization of S q under appropriate simple constraints straightforwardly yields the so-called q-exponential and q-Gaussian distributions, respectively generalizing the exponential and Gaussian ones, recovered for q = 1 . These generalized functions ubiquitously emerge in complex systems, especially as economic and financial stylized features. These include price returns and volumes distributions, inter-occurrence times, characterization of wealth distributions and associated inequalities, among others. Here, we briefly review the basic concepts of this q-statistical generalization and focus on its rapidly growing applications in economics and finance.

Keywords

• economics and finance
• nonadditive entropies
• nonextensive statistical mechanics