Since the beginning of November 2009, Ken Binmore, Emeritus Professor of Economics at London University and well-known game theorist, holds the 2nd Franz Vranitzky Chair for European Studies which was created in 2007 in honour of the former Austrian chancellor. On Tuesday 24 November 2009, Binmore will give his public lecture on "The Origins of Fairness Norms" in the Small Ceremonial Chamber. Rather than speaking as an economist, he will look into the subject from a philosopher’s perspective.

Mathematician, economist, philosopher

Ken Binmore is a man of many talents. Although he has had a long-standing career as an economist and has taught at many universities all over the world - among them the London School of Economics and the University of Michigan - he has not received any formal training in the economic discipline. Originally, he studied mathematics at the University of London and was lecturer and professor of mathematics before switching to economics in the 1980s. As an economist, Ken Binmore is most famous for his achievements in the field of game theory. In a nutshell, game theory is used to capture behaviour mathematically in strategic situations in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

The most spectacular application of game theory within economics has been to the design of auctions. In 2000, Ken Binmore became the spotlight of the media with a telecom auction that made history. He was responsible for designing a British telecom auction that won a total of $35 billion. After this success, he organised telecom auctions in countries all over the world, including Denmark, Israel, Hong Kong and Greece. Even though Binmore still teaches economics, he has become more and more engaged with philosophy in the past few years, particularly the philosophy of biology.

Game theory and fairness norms

"It is with my philosophy hat on", Binmore says, "that I give my public lecture here in Vienna. I’m particularly interested in the light that game theory can show on evolution." For somebody who has never occupied him- or herself with the theory of economics, it seems rather puzzling how the concept of fairness goes together with the strategic approach of game theory. But Binmore’s lecture is about more than fairness norms. "It’s about the origins of the human sense of fairness. Why are humans moral? Why did evolution make us moral?" He tries to answer these questions by applying game theory to biology, believing that it can help explain the process of evolution.  

"I think if we want to understand human morality and in particular the human sense of fairness, we have to go back to prehistoric times and study hunter-gatherer societies. What is very striking about hunter-gatherer groups all over the world is that they share two prominent features: First, pure hunter-gatherer societies have no bosses. And second, they are very fair in the way they distribute food. It seems to me that if these societies’ ways of doing things are so similar, it is probably because we - the human species - are genetically programmed to operate fairly."

Noam Chomsky’s "deep structure"

In order to elucidate his concept of fairness, Ken Binmore borrows Noam Chomsky’s term "deep structure", because he thinks that his concept of fairness norms operates in the same way as the structure that Chomsky assigns to language. "According to the deep structure-surface structure model, all languages have the same biologically determined deep structure. But the actual language you learn is culturally determined. So if you are brought up in Tokyo you learn Japanese, if you are brought up in Paris you learn French, this is a cultural phenomenon", so Binmore. "Correspondingly, I think the deep structure of fairness norms differs from the surface structure of our culturally determined concepts of fairness. This is why you find that what people think is fair differs between cultures. Furthermore, even within a culture, people’s fairness norms are not always the same but depend on the social context."

Teaching, publishing and sightseeing

One of the reasons why Ken Binmore has accepted the invitations to come to Vienna is because he likes opportunities to try and explain his theories: "If you just publish your books and hope people will buy them, it’s not enough. You have to be more active." Furthermore, he thinks that "Vienna is a wonderful city", and he enjoys the company of his students. "Austrian students are very polite", he finds, even though he does not like being called "Herr Professor". Apart from the work connected with his chair, Ken Binmore is finishing several papers at the moment, but he also wants to spend some time "sightseeing and finding a typical Viennese café that is not full of tourists, drink some coffee and read the London Times." (vg)
 

On Tuesday 24 November 2009 at 06:00 pm, Ken Binmore, the 2nd Franz Vranitzky Chair for European Studies, will give his public lecture on "The Origins of Fairness Norms" in the Small Ceremonial Chamber.