Reinhard Selten

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Lore & Background

Selten was born in Breslau (Wrocław) in Lower Silesia, now in Poland, to a Jewish father, Adolf Selten (a blind bookseller; d. 1942), and Protestant mother, Käthe Luther. He was raised as Protestant. After a brief family exile in Saxony and Austria, Selten returned to Hesse, Germany, after the war. In high school, he read an article in Fortune magazine about game theory by the business writer John D. McDonald. He recalled later, he would occupy his 'mind with problems of elementary geometry and algebra' while walking back and forth to school during that time. He studied mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt and obtained his diploma in 1957. He then worked as scientific assistant to Heinz Sauermann until 1967. In 1959, he married Elisabeth Langreiner; they had no children. In 1961, he also received his doctorate in Frankfurt in mathematics with a thesis on the evaluation of n-person games. He was a visiting professor at Berkeley and taught from 1969 to 1972 at the Free University of Berlin and, from 1972 to 1984, at Bielefeld University. He then accepted a professorship at the University of Bonn. There he built the BonnEconLab, a laboratory for experimental economic research, where he was active even after his retirement. Selten was professor emeritus at the University of Bonn, Germany, and held several honorary doctoral degrees. He had been an Esperantist since 1959 and met his wife through the Esperanto movement. He was a member and co-founder of the International Academy of Sciences San Marino. For the 2009 European Parliament election, he was the top candidate for the German wing of Europe – Democracy – Esperanto.

Reader's Guide

Reinhard Selten's significance lies in his foundational contributions to game theory, for which he won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with John Harsanyi and John Nash). He was Germany's first and, at the time of his death, only Nobel winner for economics. Among many other topics, he is credited with the first study of aggregative games. He is also well known for his work in bounded rationality, and can be considered one of the founding fathers of experimental economics. With Gerd Gigerenzer he edited the book Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (2001). He developed an example of a game called Selten's Horse because of its extensive form representation. His last work was 'Impulse Balance Theory and its Extension by an Additional Criterion'. He was noted for his publishing in non-refereed journals to avoid being forced to make unwanted changes to his work.

Did You Know?

• Selten was raised as Protestant, despite his Jewish father Adolf Selten (a blind bookseller who died in 1942).
• He met his wife Elisabeth Langreiner through the Esperanto movement; he had been an Esperantist since 1959.
• For the 2009 European Parliament election, he was the top candidate for the German wing of Europe – Democracy – Esperanto.
• He built the BonnEconLab, a laboratory for experimental economic research at the University of Bonn, and remained active there even after his retirement.
• He published in non-refereed journals to avoid being forced to make unwanted changes to his work.