Press releases – September 2016

Goethe University Frankfurt is mourning the death of Reinhard Selten, its former student, doctoral researcher and post-doctoral fellow, who in 1994 was the first and so far only German to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his achievements in the field of game theory. As has just become known, Selten died on the 23^rd of August aged 85.

Professor Birgitta Wolff, President of Goethe University Frankfurt, said: “Reinhard Selten was a pioneer in the field of economics. The approaches he pursued were at that time completely new in experimental economics research. In the 1950s and 1960s, when he was a student, doctoral researcher and post-doctoral fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt, he found mentors and supporters who shared his ideas and encouraged him to continue along his chosen path. His passing saddens us deeply. We are very pleased that his work, which set such a precedent, was so greatly successful.”

Raimond Maurer, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration: “German economic sciences have lost a researcher who was highly respected at international level. As a role model, he will remain part of our lives in many ways with his inquisitiveness, tenacity, and scholarly ambition.”

Reinhard Selten began at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1951 as a student of Mathematics.  He also attended lectures in Political Economy and Psychology. Already at that time, he became interested in the economic significance of games. According to his supervisor Ewald Burger, Selten’s diploma thesis “An Evaluation of Strategic Games” (1957) was already at the level of a doctoral dissertation. Whilst during that period his work was still limited to games with two players, in his doctoral thesis "An Evaluation of n-Person Games” (1961) he expanded the horizon further. This work, for which he was awarded the Doctor of Mathematics, originated during his time as a research associate at the chair of Heinz Sauermann, economist and one of the forerunners of the mathematization of economic sciences in Germany.

Alongside the further development of his game theory, Selten built up together with Sauermann the second major pillar of his scientific work, that is, experimental economics research, the objective of which is to investigate real human behaviour in laboratory situations. Both interests went hand in hand. The refinement of the Nash equilibrium with Selten’s concept of subgame perfection is still today a fundamental component of experimental economics research. In 1965, Selten laid the foundation stone for his work in this area, for which he would later be awarded the Nobel Prize, with the publication entitled “An Oligopoly Model with Demand Inertia”.

In 1968, Selten qualified as professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration with a treatise on “Price Policy in the Multi-product Firm in Static Theory” – according to its reviewers one of the most important German-language contributions to economic theory in the post-war period. In 1969, after 17 years at Goethe University Frankfurt, Selten accepted a professorship at the Free University of Berlin. Bielefeld und Bonn were to become further stations in his academic career.

With the awarding of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994 to the three leading representatives of game theory, John Harsanyi, John F. Nash and Reinhard Selten, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences acknowledged the investigation from a mathematics and economics perspective of the strategic behaviour of individuals in game situations, which for a long time tended to be regarded as a peripheral aspect of economics, and made it - and its representatives - famous at international level, also beyond the borders of the discipline itself.

Whooping cranes are changing migration patterns in response to climate and land use change, and these new patterns are being determined by the older, more experienced,  members of the population.  

Researchers from Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, the Goethe University Frankfurt, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Maryland, and the International Crane Foundation investigated a behavior known as “shortstopping,” which is the shortening of a migration route by shifting wintering grounds toward the breeding grounds. 

Shortstopping can benefit migrating birds by decreasing the amount of energy that they use on long distance flights. They also can arrive at the breeding grounds earlier, which can be beneficial. This requires that the birds find suitable overwintering sites closer to breeding grounds, and due to climate and land use change, suitable sites can now be found at higher latitudes.

“Our results show that when migratory groups winter closer to the breeding grounds, the first groups to use these new sites include older birds. For each additional year of age of the oldest bird in the group, the distance between breeding and wintering grounds was reduced by 40 km, or almost 25 miles,” said Claire Teitelbaum, a Senckenberg & Goethe University Frankfurt researcher, and lead author of the study.  “We also found that site familiarity may be an important factor in where migratory groups short-stop. Older birds often chose overwintering sites which they were familiar with from previous migrations.”

The population studied is a reintroduced population, established by the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership. In 2001, the Partnership began releasing captive-reared birds and teaching them to migrate using ultralight aircraft. The research results show that the shortstopping behavior has been developed by older birds but has then been passed to younger birds: In 2006, no 1-year-old birds shortstopped, but by 2015, 75 percent of them did so.

The more northerly wintering sites that birds are choosing also have particular characteristics. Northerly wintering sites are more likely than southerly sites to be under cultivation, and have also experienced more warming since 1900.  Grain can be an important source of food for cranes, but grain is only available if it isn’t covered by snow. According to the researchers, in this case, it might be that a combination of climate change and land-use change is facilitating changes in species ranges. 

“We found that migratory species are able to innovate new migration behaviors, possibly because of their long-term memory and ability to learn from experience,” said Thomas Mueller, a professor at Senckenberg & Goethe University and coauthor of the study. “We also identified two potential external explanations for the changing patterns, which were grain cover as a food source, and temperature changes.”

Shortstopping in this population occurs to a vastly greater degree than in the remnant wild population, which migrates between northern Canada and the Gulf coast of Texas.

“While the availability of grain and warmer temperatures allows birds to survive winters farther north, only the reintroduced population is really taking advantage of that” said Sarah Converse a research ecologist with USGS and a coauthor of the paper.

Converse went on to say “The developing culture of this young population might provide more room for innovations like short-stopping. By contrast, the culture of the remnant population is relatively old, and innovation might be less common. Some populations and species are much more likely to struggle to adapt to climate and land-use change than these Whooping Cranes are.”

Researchers used a 14 year data-set of 175 individual whooping cranes to study what was driving shortstopping in the population.

Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Professor of Macroeconomics and Development at Goethe University Frankfurt’s House of Finance, has been awarded the Gossen Prize 2016. The economist (44) received the most important German economics award during the annual meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Augsburg on Monday evening. The Gossen Prize is awarded every year to a German speaking economist who has gained international reputation for his or her research. The most important criterion are publications in internationally renowned research journals.

Monika Schnitzer, Chair of the Verein für Socialpolitik, acknowledged in her laudatory speech the significant empirical research contributions of Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln in the areas of political economics, economics of household decisions and development economics.

Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln investigates mainly the behavior of private households with respect to consumption, savings and labor supply as well as the endogeneity of preferences. Her work has been published i. a. in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Science. Since 2009, Fuchs-Schündeln holds a chair at Goethe University where she also contributes to the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” as a Principal Investigator and to the Research Center “Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe” (SAFE) as a Program Director. The past twelve months she spend at Stanford University, California, as a guest professor. In 2010, Fuchs-Schündeln received a starting grant of the European Research Council, one of the most important scientific awards in the European Union. Before coming to Frankfurt she held positions at the universities of Harvard and Yale in the U.S.

The award, which is endowed with 10,000 euros, is named after the Prussian lawyer Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810­–1858). Although hardly noticed at that time due to its mathematical nature, his book “Die Entwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln” (“The Development of the Laws of Human Interaction and the Resulting Rules of Human Behavior”) has prepared the ground for modern marginalist theory.