Rodolphe Dos Santos Ferreira

Rodolphe Dos Santos Ferreira is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Strasbourg and member of the Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée (BETA, UMR 7522 of CNRS). After studying law at the Classical University of Lisbon and economics at the University of Strasbourg, he obtained in 1974 his PhD at the University Louis Pasteur, where he became professor in the next year, through the national recruitment contest (Agrégation). retiring in 2006. He was chairman of the Faculty of Economics and Management from 1977 to 1980 and co-director of BETA from 1979 to 1992. He was active senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France in the period 1996-2006, president of the French Economic Association in 2001-2002, and received the silver medal of the CNRS for his scientific contributions.

He has published 60 papers in refereed journals, 18 chapters in books and conference proceedings, and has edited or co-edited 3 special issues of refereed journals. His research activity has been divided between economic theory and history of economic thought. He has mainly worked on oligopolistic competition, contributing in the 80’s to the early literature involving static macroeconomic models with imperfectly competitive markets and later to the macrodynamic theory of endogenous business cycles and growth ascribable to oligopolistic features. However, his work on oligopolistic competition concerned also industrial organization and general equilibrium theory. His recent microeconomic work has addressed the integration of the main static oligopoly models into a single theory involving firms with varying degrees of competitive toughness. This work purports to supply better and more general game theoretical foundations to the so-called conduct parameters used in the empirical industrial organization literature. He has also recently applied a similar approach to the analysis of household behavior, adding semi-cooperative decisions to a modeling heretofore confined to either a fully cooperative or a fully non-cooperative decision process. A significant part of his research has been and still is devoted to different topics in the history of economic analysis, sometimes linked to his main theoretical field but also related to other aspects of the work of several major authors: Aristotle, Cournot, Marx and Keynes.