Ethnicity:
His father was born in Estonia, mother was born in Argentina
Stackelberg was born in Moscow into a family of Baltic Germans. After the October Revolution, the family emigrated to Germany, first in Raciborz, then to Cologne.
In 1927 he got Master degree in economics, in 1930 PhD degree in economics.
He taught at the University of Cologne. After one semester of a position at the University of Berlin, where he worked until 1941. In 1941, he became a professor of Economics at the University of Bonn. In 1944 he emigrated to Spain where he worked as a visiting professor at Complutense University (Madrid). Died of lymphoma in 1946.
Heinrich was a neoclassic. He thought that Keynes added nothing really new to the area of available economic knowledge. He considered Keynesian theory of interest as special case of Bohm Bawerk's theory of exchange of present goods to future ones.
Heinrich had connections with those German economists who during the War prepared transition of German economy to the system of free enterprise.
Heinrich's influence on economy theory in Germany was the fact that Heinrich favoured reorientation of German economic spirit to Anglo-Saxon one.
One of his main achievements was creating new model describing behaviour of two firms in case of duopoly and imperfect information. The model describes the Stackelberg duopoly c asymmetric information. In contrast to the Cournot firms choose their strategies consistently: the firm-"leader" goes first. Firm-"slave" observes strategy leader and chooses its output. The "leader" is known that the "slave" will consider its strategy in decision making.
Stackelberg showed that the equilibrium in this model is asymmetric, unlike Cournot. The presence of information asymmetry allows "leader" to receive the greater amount of profit than the "slave."
This model served as one of the cornerstones of the modern theory of hierarchical games.
Kapital und Zins in der stationaren Verkehrswirtschaft
Bertrag zur Theorie des individualen Sparens
Grundzuge der theoretischen Volkswirtschaftslehre
Marktform und Gleichgewicht
In 1919, while in Silesia, Stackelberg, then fourteen, had already become a member of an organization of the German youth movement. Although numerous and politically diverse, groups within this movement were typically nationalistic, anti-democratic and militaristic.
He was a member of the Nazi Party in 1931 and Scharfuhrer SS since 1933.
In 1930 Stackelberg assumed a local leadership position in his youth group and joined an organization for the promotion of Baltic interests. From 1931 to 1933 he contributed five articles to the monthly magazine of his youth group and in 1932 became its editor. Stackelberg joined the National Socialist (Nazi) party in 1931. In June 1933, three months after the Nazi consolidation on power, he also became a member of the SS, the elite military wing of the Nazi party, in which he eventually attained the rank of staff sergeant. In addition, he participated in various lesser Nazi organizations, including that of the National Socialist faculty at the University of Cologne
Stackelberg's political writings and speeches during the early 1930s supported, or at least were uncritical of, standard Nazi positions, as reflected in his support for economic autarky. This stance coincided with the Nazi primacy of politics over other considerations such as economics. As Stackelberg put it, "we must soberly emphasize that the economy is a system of means and its purpose is not derived from itself but from outside, from the idea of the nation"
Stackelberg argued that all social organizations, including political parties under democracy, are built on a pyramid-like structure such that the "political characteristic of ruling over others always falls on a minority, or an 'elite"' He concluded that the "democratic idea: 'All authority emanates from the people' is either naivete or fraud
Stackelberg's more extreme political statements were expressed in the early 1930s when he was in his twenties. Soon after the Nazi takeover, his strictly political writings ended. His later participation in an opposition group reflected his eventual disillusionment with Nazism.
In 1943 he participated in the first meeting in Freiburg of the neoliberal group of economists and lawyers chaired by Beckerath.
Stackelberg was in Spain at the time of the attempted coup, but because of their contacts to conspirators such as his friend and colleague Jessen, some members of the Freiburg School were arrested or interrogated by the Gestapo. Stackelberg's association with this group was probably the primary reason for his official "rehabilitation" after his death
He concluded that the "democratic idea: 'All authority emanates from the people' is either naivete or fraud" and raised the notion of Plato's philosopher king. This pessimism regarding parliamentary democracy was a product of the failures of the Weimar Republic much as it was for Plato a product of the defeat of democratic Athens by militaristic Sparta
Plato
economist
economist of Freiburg school of economics
