Holler, Manfred (1946-)

The economist Manfred J. Holler is primarily an applied game theorist whose writings have spanned both cooperative and noncooperative game theory. He is coauthor of one of the most popular German textbooks on the subject.

Born in Munich, Germany, Holler studied economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, where he also obtained his doctorate (1975) and Habilitation (1984) (a German postdoctoral qualification necessary for a professorship). Following a number of temporary appointments in Munich, he became an associate professor at the Institute of Economics and Statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in 1986. In 1991, he was appointed to the Chair of Microeconomic Theory at the University of Hamburg.

Holler's contributions to research on power have mainly been concerned with power indices. He is the originator of the Public Goods Index (PGI). This index belongs to the family of indices based on minimal winning coalitions (another such index is the Deegan-Packel index). Holler was initially critical of his own creation because it is not monotone in voting weights, which means that if we compare two voters i and j such that i has more votes than j, it can be the case that the PGI assigns more voting power to j than to i. In later writings, Holler has taken the position that if the rationale of an index is acceptable, then we should accept such power assignments because the very idea of a power index is to test our intuitions of power distributions, not confirm them. A power index that would simply confirm our intuitions about the distribution of power would not provide us with any additional knowledge and therefore be unnecessary.

Another strand of Holler's research is connected with the analysis and application of the so-called inspection game. A third area of interest is industrial organization with a focus on standardization and market entry. He also has diverse interests in law and economics, cultural economics, and the history of economic and political thought. Most recently, he has turned to writing on Adam Smith and Niccolò Machiavelli.

Holler has been highly active as an editor, putting together a series of books on power indices and coalition formation as well as founding the European Journal of Political Economy and Homo Oeconomicus, which was one of the first German-language journals to concentrate on rational choice and game theory (it now has converted entirely to [Page 324]publishing in English). Under Holler's editorship, Homo Oeconomicus has become one of the primary outlets for research on the measurement of power.