GRK 2865:  Coping with Uncertainty in Dynamic Economies

• Subject Area: Economics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 492988838

The proposed RTG’s innovation is to explore a new subfield in economic theory that merges two features central to current and future economies: uncertainty and dynamics. We understand uncertainty in the sense of Frank Knight, in that decision makers struggle to assign reliable estimates of probabilities to future events. This Knightian uncertainty is widely believed to capture our world’s megatrends such as climate change, energy crisis, migration, pandemics, and technological development. Its analysis has been a central research topic in decision theory for the last two decades, and increasingly in microeconomic theory more generally, currently being explored at research centers around the world. Leading researchers work at the Paris School of Economics (Jean-Marc Tallon) and Toulouse School of Economics (Christian Gollier) in France, the University of California Berkeley (Chris Shannon) and Northwestern University (Peter Klibanoff) in the United States, or Queen Mary University London (Sujoy Mukerji) in the United Kingdom, to name some examples, notably with uncertainty research having been a distinctive theme also of Bielefeld’s Center for Mathematical Economics (Institut für Mathematische Wirtschaftsforschung, IMW) for about the same period of time. As the main innovation of our program, we seek to explore the implications of uncertainty in dynamic economies, which is vastly understudied at present but critical to answer the economic questions raised by the aforementioned megatrends. The theoretical and applied analysis of dynamic behavior, in turn, is the central research theme of many of Bielefeld’s economists even outside the IMW. Thus, the planned RTG “Coping with Uncertainty in Dynamic Economies” not only bundles two of the central themes distinguishing future from past economies, but also combines the two main themes of Bielefeld’s economists, and thereby promises to establish the foundation of a new subfield in economics while strengthening the links and collaborations among Bielefeld’s economists. We believe that the focus on these two topics, in conjunction with the respective group of PIs, renders the proposed RTG unique within the landscape of German RTGs.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Universität Bielefeld
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Frank Riedel
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Yves Breitmoser; Professor Dr. Herbert Dawid; Professor Giorgio Ferrari, Ph.D.; Professor Manuel Foerster, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Christiane Fuchs; Professor Dr. Dominik Karos; Professor Dr. Max Nendel; Professorin Maren Diane Schmeck, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Anna Zaharieva