Reinhard Selten

Origins and early life

Reinhard Selten was born in Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland, on 5 October 1930, the son of Käthe Luther and of Adolf Selten, who had gone blind young and built up a business lending folders of magazines.

Work and career

His father was of Jewish origin and belonged to no religious community, his mother was a Protestant, and under the Nazi regime they had him baptized a Protestant as a small boy; as a young man he left the church. In the mid-thirties his father had to sell the firm because Jews were barred from the press trade, and he died of an illness in 1942, before the worst of the terror, which several other relatives did not survive.

As a half-Jewish boy he had to leave school at fourteen, barred even from learning a trade, and near the end of the war he left Breslau with his family on one of the last trains. After years as a refugee and farm boy, he finished school in Melsungen in 1951, studied mathematics in Frankfurt, where a seminar drew him into game theory, and took his doctorate there in 1961. As assistant to Heinz Sauermann he was among the first to run laboratory experiments in economics, and in a 1965 paper on oligopoly he defined subgame perfection, which admits only credible threats, refining it in 1975 with the trembling-hand equilibrium.

He met John Harsanyi in Jerusalem in 1965, and about eighteen years of joint work produced their General Theory of Equilibrium Selection in Games in 1988. After chairs in Berlin and Bielefeld he moved in 1984 to Bonn, where he built a computerised laboratory for experimental economics.

Recognition

In 1994 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Harsanyi and John Nash “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games”, the first German to receive it. An Esperantist, he married Elisabeth Langreiner, whom he had met through the movement, in 1959, and he died in Poznań on 23 August 2016.