  The enterprise of trying to explain different social and economic phenomena
using concepts and ideas drawn from physics has a long history. Statistical
mechanics, in particular, has been often seen as most likely to provide the
means to achieve this, because it provides a lucid and concrete framework for
describing the collective behavior of systems comprising large numbers of
interacting entities. Several physicists have, in recent years, attempted to
use such tools to throw light on the mechanisms underlying a plethora of
socio-economic phenomena. These endeavors have led them to develop a community
identity - with their academic enterprise being dubbed as "econophysics" by
some. However, the emergence of this field has also exposed several academic
fault-lines. Social scientists often regard physics-inspired models, such as
those involving spins coupled to each other, as over-simplifications of
empirical phenomena. At the same time, while models of rational agents who
strategically make choices based on complete information so as to maximize
their utility are commonly used in economics, many physicists consider them to
be caricatures of reality. We show here that while these contrasting approaches
may seem irreconcilable there are in fact many parallels and analogies between
them. In addition, we suggest that a new formulation of statistical mechanics
may be necessary to permit a complete mapping of the game-theoretic formalism
to a statistical physics framework. This may indeed turn out to be the most
significant contribution of econophysics.
