Dockner Lectures

In memory of Prof. Engelbert Dockner, the University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Technology and the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration have founded the "Dockner Lectures".

In April 2017 one of the most renowned Austrian economists, Engelbert Dockner, passed away after a long and serious illness.

In his Ph. D. thesis, Engelbert Dockner derived an elegant stability analysis of two-​state optimal control models. Another of his path-​breaking contributions is the 'blue bible' on `Differential Games in Economics and Management Science' (joint with Jorgensen, Long and Sorger). For most of his career, he was a professor of finance and worked on diverse topics such as asset pricing, risk dynamics, and financial market structures.

Past Events

May 10, 2022 - Cars Hommes (University of Amsterdam)
"Complex Economic Dynamics" 

Abstract: This talk surveys some of Prof. Hommes' work on complex economic dynamics with adaptively learning agents in behavioral macro-finance models. The economy consists of boundedly rational agents who do not fully understand their complex environment and use simple decision heuristics. This leads to a complex nonlinear adaptive system with complex dynamics, where the economy may not settle down to the rational equilibrium, but rather agents may learn almost self-fulfilling equilibria with highly persistent expectations driven fluctuations.

April 10, 2019 - Ngo Van Long (McGill University)
"International oligopoly with public investments in trade-​facilitating infrastructure: a differential game "

Abstract: The first models of dynamic international oligopoly were developed by Engelbert Dockner and Alfred Haug in 1990 and 1991, using the partial equilibrium framework. The present paper proposes a general equilibrium setting, in which we consider a differential game between two governments that invest in transportation infrastructure in order to help their exporting oligopolists in terms of reduced transport costs. Each country has a set of oligopolistic firms some of which compete in the world market. Countries differ from each other in terms of population sizes and the number of differentiated products. We study the incentives for countries to build up (or not to build up) infrastructure capital and show how the patterns of trade evolve along the equilibrium path. The possibilities of multiple equilibria and Skiba points are explored. The paper sheds light on the roles of history and expectations in shaping the development of nations.