Ronald Noë

Ronald Noë teaches ethology, behavioral ecology and human evolution at the University of Strasbourg, France. He studied biology in Groningen and got his PhD in Utrecht, both in his native country, The Netherlands. He held positions at the University of Zürich, Switzerland and at the Max-Planck Institute in Seewiesen, near Munich in Germany, before moving to France in 1998. Most of his research had something to do with cooperation in primates. He founded the Taï Monkey Project, a program of research on eight species of forest monkeys in Ivory Coast, in 1989. He is probably better known, however, for his theoretical work on ‘biological market theory’. After a first paper written with fellow primatologists Jan van Hooff and Carel van Schaik, he developed more formal Biological Market models together with Peter Hammerstein, a game theorist. From 2006 till 2011 he was heavily involved in three multidisciplinary European networks, all with cooperation as their central theme. He recently spent a sabbatical year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) at Wassenaar, The Netherlands, where he started working on a book on ‘Markets in Nature’ (to be published by Cambridge UP).