Chaos and complexity in a fractional-order financial system with time delays.

• Finance and economics are complex nonlinear systems, affected by various external factors. • We study the dynamics and complexity in a fractional-order financial system with time delays. • We observe fascinating transitions to deterministic chaos, including cascading period doubling. • Complexity is particularly high in response to variations of derivative orders. • Derivative orders are identified as key system parameters. Finance and economics are complex nonlinear systems that are affected by various external factors, including of course human action, bilateral relations, conflicts, and policy. Time delays in a financial system take into account the amount of time that passes from a particular policy or decision being made to it actually taking effect. It is thus important to consider time delays as an integral part of modeling in this field. Moreover, many features of financial systems cannot be expressed sufficiently precisely by means of integer-order calculus. Fractional-order calculus alleviates these shortcomings. The aim of this paper is therefore to study the dynamics and complexity in a fractional-order financial system with time delays. We observe fascinating transitions to deterministic chaos, including cascading period doubling, as well as high levels of complexity. This is particularly true in response to variations of derivative orders, which are thus identified as key system parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]