Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T00:44:22.978Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2016 The Author(s)

References

Badiou, A. (2007) Being and Event. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Beunza, D. and Stark, D. (2012) From dissonance to resonance: Cognitive interdependence in quantitative finance. Economy and Society, 41(3): 383–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bjerg, O. (2014) Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Black, F. and Scholes, M. (1973) The pricing of options and corporate liabilities. Journal of Political Economy, 81(3): 637–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brush, S. G. (1976) The Kind of Motion We Call Heat: A History of the Kinetic Theory of Gases in the 19th Century. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Cont, R. and Tankov, P. (2004) Financial Modelling with Jump Processes. London: Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Engels, F., Marx, K., and Dutt, C. (1941) Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. New York, NY: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Franklin, J. (2001) The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Hadden, R.W. (1994) On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modern Europe. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Hald, A. (1990) A History of Probability and Statistics and their Applications before 1750. New York, NY: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, J.M. and Kreps, D.M. (1979) Martingales and arbitrage in multi-period securities markets. Journal of Economic Theory, 20(3): 381–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, J.M. and Pliska, S.R. (1981) Martingales and stochastic integrals in the theory of continuous trading. Stochastic Processes and their Applications, 11(3): 215–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, J.M. and Pliska, S.R. (1983) A stochastic calculus model of continuous trading: Complete markets. Stochastic Processes and their Applications, 15(3): 313–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heims, S.J. (1980) John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematicians to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hobson, D. (2011) The Skorokhod Embedding problem and model-independent bounds for option prices. In: Carmona, R. (ed.) Paris-Princeton Lecture s on Mathematical Finance 2010. Berlin: Springer, 267–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jaynes, E.T. (2003) Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, T.C. (2011) What is financial mathematics? In: Pitic, M. (ed.) The Best Writing on Mathematics: 2010. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 43–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, T.C. (2015a) Finance and mathematics: Where is the ethical malaise? The Mathematical Intelligencer, 37(4): 8–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, T.C. (2015b) Reciprocity as a foundation of Financial Economics. The Journal of Business Ethics, 131(1): 43–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jovanovic, F. and Le Gall, P. (2001) Does God practice a random walk? The ‘financial physics’ of a nineteenth-century forerunner, Jules Regnault. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 8(3): 332–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaye, J. (1998) Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendall, D.G., Batchelor, G.K., and Bingham, N.H. et al. (1990) Andrei Nikolaevich KoImogorov (1903-1987). Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 22(1): 31–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendall, M.G. (1949). On the reconciliation of theories of probability. Biometrika, 36(1/2): 101–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levy, J. (2012) Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, D. (2008) An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Meillassoux, Q. (2011) History and event in Alain Badiou. Parrhesia, 12:1–11.Google Scholar
Palmer, G. (1974) The emergence of modern finance in Europe 1500-1750. In: Cipolla, C. (ed.) The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Collins/Fontana, 527–94.Google Scholar
Pliska, S. (1997) Introduction to Mathematical Finance: Discrete Time Models. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Poincaré, H. and Gould, S.J. (2001) The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincaré. New York, NY: Modern Library.Google Scholar
Poitras, G. (2000) The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478 1776. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, B. (2009) An Outline of Philosophy. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seaford, R. (2004) Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shafer, G. and Vovk, V. (2001) Probability and Finance: It's Only a Game! New York, NY: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sylla, E.D. (2006) Commercial arithmetic, theology and the intellectual foundations of Jacob Bernoulli's Art of Conjecturing. In: Poitras, G. (ed.) Pioneers of Financial Economics: Contributions Prior to Irving Fisher. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 11–45.Google Scholar
Taleb, N.N. (2007) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York, NY: Random House.Google Scholar
von Mises, R. (1982) Probability, Statistics and Truth. New York, NY: Dover.Google Scholar
von Plato, J. (1994) Creating Modern Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimmermann, H. and Hafner, W. (2007) Amazing discovery: Vincenz Bronzin's option pricing models. Journal of Banking and Finance, 31(2): 531–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar