Preface

Evident from this definition, or from any of its variants that one can find in the growing literature on the subject, are two characteristic aspects. The first one being that such a risk takes place at a much larger scale than that of an individual institution. The second one being that it eventually spreads to the real economy outside the financial system through various “leakage” mechanisms, of which the last crisis has given some examples: liquidity shrinkage, fire sale of assets, drop in market value of derivatives. . . This type of risk, long confined to the monetary market, has spread widely in the recent past, culminating in the subprime crisis of 2008. The understanding and control of systemic risk has therefore become an extremely important societal and economic question. Such problems are now extensively being studied by people from disciplines like economics, finance and physics. The contributions by physicists are relatively new. The Econophys-Kolkata VI conference, the 6th event in this series of international conferences, held during October 21–25 last year, was dedicated to address and discuss extensively these issues and the recent developments. Like the last event in the series, this one was also organized jointly by the École Centrale Paris and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, and was held at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata. This proceedings volume contains the written versions of most of the talks and seminars delivered by distinguished experts from all over the world, participating in the meeting, and accepted after refereeing. For some completeness in the cases of one or two important topics (like in the case Many-agent Games), some reviews, by experts who could not attend, were invited and incorporated in this volume.