Modern economic theory does not provide a sound foundation on which to build econophysics. Pivotal concepts like utility maximization, perfect competition, and diminishing marginal productivity are empirically and logically flawed. Physicists should not use any of these in econophysics, and...

Econophysics has already made a number of important empirical contributions to our understanding of the social and economic world. These fall mainly into the areas of finance and industrial economics, where in each case there is a large amount of reasonably well-defined data.

Neoclassical economics has two theories of competition between profit-maximizing firms—Marshallian and Cournot–Nash—that start from different premises about the degree of strategic interaction between firms, yet reach the same result, that market price falls as the number of firms in an...