Special issue on soft computing in economic application.

Engineering and science are very important for our lives: science provides fundamental ideas that engineers transform into useful designs, from a computer on which we are preparing this editorial to cars on which we drive to our offices to refrigerators that store our lunches. In engineering, we mostly know the equations that describe the desired phenomena: we know the equations that describe the trajectory of a spaceship, we know the equations that describe how electrons move inside a computer, and we know how refrigerators work. On the other hand, those readers who are developing new soft computing techniques and applying them in engineering will hopefully better understand how such methods can be used in economics as well - and all together, we will progress even further. [Extracted from the article]