Reinhard Selten, who was expelled from school in Germany when he was 14 because he was half Jewish, but returned after World War II to study mathematics and become the country’s first and only Nobel winner for economics, died on Aug. 23 in Poznan, Poland. He was 85.
His death was announced by the University of Bonn, where he had taught since 1984 and was professor emeritus. No cause was given.
Professor Selten shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science with John C. Harsanyi, a Hungarian-born economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and John F. Nash Jr., the Princeton mathematician whose severe mental illness and eventual recovery were recounted in the book and film “A Beautiful Mind.”
The prize celebrated their pioneering advances in game theory, or strategic decision-making by individuals, businesses, nations and even nature on matters like playing poker, nuclear deterrence and biological evolution.
By awarding them the prize, the Nobel committee also recognized a fundamental shift in economic theory: from the model of predicting that free markets evolve from perfect competition to more robust versions based on give-and-take behaviors that acknowledge other factors, like hostile takeovers, trade wars and big government.
“It’s like playing chess,” Professor Selten told The New York Times when he was awarded the prize. “You have to think hard about what you think your opponent will do, and then you plan your own strategy based on that. You may not always be right, but such thinking probably makes you play better and keeps you from making as many dumb moves.”
Or, as Peter Passell wrote in The Times at the time, “While classical economics works for the international market in wheat with thousands of buyers and sellers, it takes game theory to try to figure out how Safeway will change the price of English muffins if the A.&P. marks down bagels.”
Alvin E. Roth, another Nobel laureate in economics, who teaches at Stanford University, wrote in 1999 that game theory and experimental economics were two of the most important developments in the field in the second half of the 20th century.
“Reinhard Selten is one of the pioneers in both of these endeavors, and he has been a leader in each of them throughout his career,” Professor Roth wrote. “This makes him unique: No one else in the world has made such important or such sustained contributions to both fields.”
Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten was born on Oct. 5, 1930, in what was then Breslau, Germany, and is now Wroclaw, Poland. His father, Adolf Selten, a blind bookseller with a third-grade education, was Jewish. His mother, the former Kathe Luther, was Protestant.
The couple decided that they would let Reinhard decide on a religion for himself, but as the Nazis began imposing laws against Jews, they had him baptized. His father died in 1942.
In his official Nobel biography, Professor Selten recalled that despite the baptism he was not only dismissed from high school as a son of a Jew but was also denied the opportunity to learn a trade. He was relegated to menial labor.
“My situation as a member of an officially despised minority forced me to pay close attention to political matters very early in my life,” he wrote. “Moreover, I found myself in opposition to the political views shared by the vast majority of the population.
“I had to learn to trust my own judgment rather than official propaganda or public opinion. This was a strong influence on my intellectual development. My continuing interest in politics and public affairs was one of the reasons why I began to be interested in economics in my last high school years.”
In 1945, as the German defenses weakened and Soviet troops advanced, he, his mother, his brothers and his sister escaped Breslau by train and fled to Austria, where he worked as a farmhand. He returned to Germany after the war and was able to continue his education there. In high school, he was captivated by an article in Fortune magazine about game theory by the business writer John D. McDonald.
“I had to walk to school, which took about three and a half hours there and back,” Professor Selten recalled. “During these walks I occupied my mind with problems of elementary geometry and algebra.”
He graduated from Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he went on to receive his master’s degree and, in 1961, his doctorate. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and also taught at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Bielefeld before joining the University of Bonn in 1984.
He married Elisabeth Langreiner, whom he had met through the movement to spread Esperanto, a language developed in the 19th century to encourage global communication. Like Professor Selten, she had diabetes; both her legs were amputated below the knee. There was no immediate word on his survivors.
The Nobel economics committee’s recommendation to award the prize was almost overruled by the full Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and prompted an unprecedented floor debate because of concerns about Dr. Nash’s mental state. But his advocates, and the committee’s desire to acknowledge the growing importance of game theory, carried the day.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Professor Selten expanded on Dr. Nash’s groundbreaking game theory research, devising complex formulas. One is colloquially called “the chain store paradox,” whereby the threat of a price war in one market affects other markets; another is “the trembling hand equilibrium,” whereby each player believes there is a small probability that a mistake will occur.
Professor Selten’s research topics “seem often strongly risk-seeking and sometimes almost contrarian,” Abdolkarim Sadrieh, a former student of his and now a teacher himself, wrote in 2010. But he said that the professor could be cautious in his personal life. For one thing, Dr. Sadrieh noted, he always carried an umbrella.