Generative Adversarial Networks in Business and Social Science

Featured Application The importance of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in economics is growing and is driven by successes in other fields. Many economic problems could benefit from GANs, although few studies exist and progress is needed. This paper argues for the use of GANs as a novel and effective tool in economics. An important issue is the need for large datasets, where traditional techniques fall short due to a multiplicity of problems, making the use of GANs very useful in this task.Abstract Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have become a recent and rapidly developing research topic in machine learning. Since their inception in 2014, a significant number of variants have been proposed to address various topics across many fields, and they have particularly excelled not only in image and language processing but also in the medical and data science domains. In this paper, we aim to highlight the significance of and advancements that these GAN models can introduce in the field of Business Economics, where they have yet to be fully developed. To this end, a review of the literature of GANs is presented in general together with a more specific review in the field of Business Economics, for which only a few papers can be found. Furthermore, the most relevant papers are analysed in order to provide approaches for the opportunity to research GANs in the field of Business Economics.