Reinhard Selten is a German economist. He can be considered as one of the founding fathers of experimental economics.
Education
"It was not easy for me to live as a half-Jewish boy under the Hitler regime. When I was 14 I had to leave high school and the opportunity to learn a trade was denied to me.
After we left Breslau we were refugees, first in Saxonia, then in Austria and finally in Hessia. Until schools opened again in 1946 I worked as a farm boy, first in Austria and later in the village in Hessia where we lived. In 1947, we moved to Melsungen, a small town in which I went to high school until 1951. In these years I developed a strong interest in mathematics."
Selten became interested in game theory after reading about it in Fortune in the late 1940s. He earned his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Frankfurt in 1957 and his Ph.D. at the same school in 1961. He was a full professor of economics at the Free University of Berlin from 1969 to 1972. This was a period of student “unrest,” which, wrote Selten, “made teaching difficult and sometimes impossible.” For other reasons, though, he moved to the University of Bielefed in 1972 and stayed there until 1984, when he moved to the University of Bonn. He often collaborated with fellow future Nobel winner John Harsanyi.
Career
Selten is professor emeritus at the University of Bonn, Germany, and holds several honorary doctoral degrees. He has been an Esperantist since 1959., and met his wife through the Esperanto movement. He is a member and co-founder of the International Academy of Sciences San Marino.
In 1965 he attended a small workshop in Jerusalem where he met John C Harsanyi for the first time; the two began joint work from this time. After spending the year 1967-68 visiting the University of California, Berkeley, Selten submitted his Habilitationsschrift on multiproduct pricing to Frankfurt University, the award being made in 1968. In 1969 Selten was appointed to a chair of economics at the Free University in Berlin.
After twelve years at the Institute for Mathematical Economics of the University of Bielefeld he moved to a chair at the University of Bonn where an experimental economics laboratory was being set up. However, he spent the year 1987-88 back at Bielefeld running a year-long research workshop on game theory in the behavioural sciences.
Politics
The coming to power of the Nazi party in Germany in 1933 led to the passing of laws which prevented Jews from holding employment connected to the press, so Adolf Selten was forced to sell his business. Adolf and Käthe had decided that, given their religious positions, they would let Reinhard grow up without any religious attachment so that he could make his own choice when he reached the appropriate age. However given the moves made by the Nazis against the Jews beginning in 1933, they decided that they would have Reinhard baptised as a protestant.
Being baptised as a protestant did not save Selten from the severe problems of growing up in Nazi Germany with a Jewish father. When he was eleven years old his father died.