Taking another birthday as an occasion, we are continuing our member introduction series with Prof. Dr. Claus-Jochen Haake. He has been employed as professor at Paderborn University since 2009 and is the head of the Chair of Microeconomics. Here you can see a description of the courses he offers.
Let's get to know him:
I decided to work at the Chair of Microeconomics because…
… Hmm… Let’s replace that question. I started to get interested in Microeconomics and particularly Game Theory, because it is concerned with peoples’ interactions, but also brings in ideas of fairness.
In a typical day at work, my main tasks are…
… preparing and giving lectures, working on research papers, advising students, caring about administrative things – the weights are, however, different from day to day and sometimes unpredictable.
With respect to research, my main interests include…
… cooperative game theory, especially bargaining (theory), matching markets, fair division problems, competition. Microeconomics has so much more than what we can teach in the first year.
What turned out to be the most difficult for me since working from home...
… is to draw the line between home and office. And, video conferencing is definitely not a perfect substitute for real life contacts, but I am glad that our group manages to stay in touch via Zoom, Skype, WebEx …. Producing lecture videos was harder at the beginning. Meanwhile, I (hopefully) do not publish outtakes anymore, just because I did not manage to operate the pause button correctly. :-)
My most special experience since being part of our team is…
In this team, each day is a unique experience, especially on those days, when you see someone taking a step ahead.
In the future, I would like to achieve/work on…
… too many things for just 24 hours a day, including (interdependent) bargaining, security in matching mechanisms, organization of neighbourhood help, use of game theory to assess product qualities, social design, … Most of this is connected to the research agenda followed in the Collaborative Research Centre 901 “On-The-Fly Computing”, a project, in which computer scientists and economists work together on automated IT-service composition.
Last but not least, my favourite sports club, movie/series, travel destination is…
Sports club: Borussia Mönchengladbach (could there be a different answer? :-)) For reasons of discretion, I do not want to report about our last year’s “Christmas soccer excursion” to the Borussia Park, with a (non-glorious) victory of 2:0 over the SCP :-)
Movie: Ocean’s 11 because of the tricky plot. (I should say “A beautiful mind”, the movie about John Nash’s life, but after I heard that Russell Crowe needed a hand double to write down mathematical stuff on the blackboard, it went down on my list…)
Destination: The US west coast, especially Santa Barbara and Pasadena, where I spent several months in the past. Amazing that you can plan a big graduation ceremony under the blue sky without even thinking about a Plan B for bad weather.
