The Collaborative Research Center is an interdisciplinary endeavor aiming to develop basic concepts and theories for dealing with “good” and “bad” uncertainty. The new insights shall be applied to unsolved problems in various fields of economics and the natural sciences, especially in biology and physics. The CRC consists of 18 projects, most of which are located at the Faculty of Mathematics, but also at the Center for Mathematical Economics, the Faculty of Physics, and the Faculty of Technology. The funding is provided by the German Science Foundation and amounts to about 10 million Euro for the first four years. In particular, it covers 13 doctorate posts and 13 postdoc positions.
“On the one hand, the CRC wants to tame uncertainty and, on the other hand, profit from randomness, and use it wisely” explains SFB spokesman Röckner. There are uncertainties beyond probability-descriptive randomness. Such model uncertainties played a major role in the financial crisis, as investment banks misinterpreted ratings as accurate probabilities.