I am very leery of taking the mathematics from one discipline and applying to another. There was an interesting article in a recent Science about how the mathematics of economics was originally adapted from the nineteenth century mathematics of physics. The conversion from physical variables to economic variables was very metaphorical, but inaccurate.

I recently attended an economics seminar at U.C. Berkeley given by Daniel Kahnemann, a psychologist at Princeton who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2003, I believe. The thrust of his talk was that 180 peer-reviewed papers showed that political scientists and economists could not predict middle and long term events with any accuracy. So much for the elegance of economic theory. Also, remember that Long Term Capital Management went bankrupt when its founders, Merton and Sholes (Nobel prize winners in economics) used their economic theory to bankrupt a major investment company and need a cosmic bailout.

In summary, using models from one science for another may contain hidden assumptions that are incorrect and lead to incorrect conclusions.