• Economics
• Areas of study in economics
• Interdisciplinary studies and cross-application
• Economic language and reasoning
• Modern mainstream economics

Interdisciplinary studies and cross-application

There has been an increasing trend for ideas and methods from economics to be applied in wider contexts. Economic analysis focuses on decision making, and has been applied, with varying degrees of success, to various fields where people are faced with alternatives – education, marriage, health, law, crime, war, and religion.[citation needed]Public choice theory can apply to political science (see political economy, which has a variety of meanings) and sociology (see socioeconomics).

Econophysics is an interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed within Physics in order to solve problems in Economics, usually those including uncertainties or stochastic elements and nonlinear dynamics.

Information theory has been applied to economics since the work of Ronald Coase in the 1930s. However, with Herbert Simon and John von Neumann in the 1950s, it gathered a more specific formalism as part of game theory. This emphasizes that the decision-making process itself is costly.[citation needed]