Dear Colleagues,

A growing literature in economics, political economy, and broader social inquiry has offered a wide range of applications of concepts and tools from information theory. These have included the development of estimation methods in econometrics; the use of statistical equilibria and informational constraints in Walrasian and game-theoretic characterizations of individual behavior, social interaction, and market functioning; uses of the principle of maximum entropy to characterize the form and social content of persistently observed cross-sectional distributional forms in economic data; and the use of informational measures of heterogeneity and association to measure systemic patterns of discrimination and segregation in socio-economic outcomes. 

Despite the breadth of these applications, there is no generally accepted understanding of why and how concepts like entropy, relative entropy, mutual information, and informational gains may be useful to economic and social analysis, or of the reasonable scopes within which their use may further our understanding of economic behavior and of the functioning of economic and social systems. This absence has, so far, limited the capacity of this promising literature to make a significant impact in contemporary economic and social thought.

By gathering papers discussing both the historically influential contributions to this literature and more recent, innovative applications and interpretations, This Special Issue aims to promote debate on the bases, problems, and benefits of the use of information-theoretic concepts in economic analysis and broader social inquiry. In line with this objective, topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Statistical-equilibrium models of markets and economic systems
• Inattention and economic behavior
• Informational constraints, game theory, and social interaction
• Information theoretic instruments in statistical estimation
• Complexity and self-organization in economic and broader social systems
• Mutual information, segregation, and discrimination in social and economic systems
• Econophysics
• Conceptual and methodological problems in the applications of information-theoretic tools in economic and social analysis.

Prof. Duncan Foley
Dr. Paulo dos Santos
Guest Editors

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