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 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 in 2003 the silver medal of the CNRS for his scientific contributions and in 2020 the Fellowship of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory.

He published more than 70 papers in refereed journals, 20 chapters in books and conference proceedings, and 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. In the two last decades, his 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 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. Finally, he has contributed in the last years to the literature devoted to the Keynesian beauty contest, where differently informed agents may coordinate their expectations on states divorced from any reference to the fundamentals.  A significant part of his research has been and is still 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, such as Aristotle, Cournot, Marx and Keynes.

September 2025