Reinhard Selten

"My first contact with game theory was a popular article in Fortune Magazine which I read in my last high school year. I was immediately attracted to the subject matter and when I studied mathematics I found the fundamental book by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the library and studied it."

"In 1965, I was invited to a game theory workshop at Jerusalem which lasted for three weeks and had only 17 participants, but among them all the important researchers in game theory, with few exceptions. Game theory was still a small field. We had heated discussions about Harsanyis new theory of games with incomplete information. This was the beginning of my long cooperation with John C. Harsanyi."

"Reinhard Selten shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics with John Nash and john harsanyi “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games.” One problem with various Nash equilibria is that they are not always unique. Selten applied stronger conditions to reduce the number of possible equilibria and to eliminate equilibria that are unreasonable economically. In 1965 he introduced the concept of “subgame perfection,” his term for this winnowing down of possible equilibria. “At that time I did not suspect that it often would be quoted, almost exclusively for the definition of subgame perfectness,” Selten wrote in his Nobel autobiography."

"My masters thesis and later my Ph.D. thesis had the aim of axiomatizing a value for e-person games in extensive form. This work made me familiar with the extensive form, in a time when very little work on extensive games was done. This enabled me to see the perfectness problem earlier than others and to write the contributions for which I am now honored by the prize in memory of Alfred Nobel."

"I was always skeptical about authority, about things which were told by authorities, because I was living in a country and in a time where the authority was utterly wrong, in my view. And therefore I distrusted, I feared authority, I also fear it today. I am in a very, very fearful, I mean maybe more than other people, but I distrust authority. That makes me more independent and also some part of rebellious,... I’m a maverick."