Center for Uncertainty Studies Blog

Herbert Dawid is Chair for Economic Theory and Computational Economics at the Department of Business Administration and Economics at Bielefeld University and one of three Founding Directors of CeUS, © Philipp Ottendörfer.

CeUS was founded about two years ago – What are your highlights so far?

We had a number of great events, but my personal highlight was the conference on ‘Navigating Uncertainty: Preparing Society for the Future’ in summer 2023. The conference did not only highlight how strongly many aspects of our lives are affected by uncertainty, but also showed how different the approaches to analyze effects of uncertainty are in different disciplines. I found this really interesting and something you hardly realize when attending standard disciplinary conferences. It also shows how challenging the agenda of CeUS is to foster fruitful exchange between researchers from different disciplines who study various aspects of uncertainty.

What role does Uncertainty play in your research?

Uncertainty plays a crucial role in essentially all my research topics. Part of my work deals with analyzing innovation activities of firms. The outcomes of these activities are typically characterized by a large amount of uncertainty, not only because it is hard to predict if it is possible to develop a desired new technology or product and how long this might take, but also because the success of an innovation on the market is often very uncertain. Another area of my research, where uncertainty plays a large role is the study of which macro level patterns emerge in socio-economic systems from the interaction of (heterogeneous) individual agents. Non-linearities, feedback effects and path dependencies can make it very hard to predict the dynamics of the entire system even if we have a good understanding of the (statistical) properties of individual behavior. In this sense, uncertainty here might be generated on the macro level.

To what extent is interdisciplinarity important in your work?

In my work I have always cooperated with colleagues from different disciplines, such as Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering or Law. The work on the navigation of uncertainty and its societal effects in the context of CeUS has reinforced my conviction that interdisciplinary work is needed to make progress there. Expertise from areas such as Psychology or Social Science is essential and a really interesting interdisciplinary group has emerged in Bielefeld to work on this.

What would you like to accomplish at the Center for Uncertainty Studies in the future?

In my view CeUS is mainly a platform for fostering exchange between colleagues interested in uncertainty related research. I hope that CeUS can improve our common understanding of how to analyze the effects of uncertainty and can help to initialize interesting new cooperations in this domain.

To sum it up: Do you have specific strategies in your personal or professional life to deal with uncertainty?

I try not to be too much concerned about the uncertainty I am facing. Generally speaking I tend to have a positive perspective on life, so I try to see the chances of uncertainty rather than focusing on potential negative outcomes.  

Thank you very much!