Obituary of Prof. Dr. Udo Müller

Born on 05.12.1935, Udo Müller decided to study economics at the University of Münster, where he graduated in 1960. He then received his doctorate in 1965 from the University of Würzburg with a thesis on "Economic Problems and Effects of Comparative Consumer Goods Tests". After periods as a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Würzburg and at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Würzburg, and as an academic councillor and professor at the University of Münster, Udo Müller was appointed to the Chair of Regulatory and Process Policy at the Institute of Economics at Leibniz University in Hanover in 1974. Here, Udo Müller first worked as the founding dean of the Department of Economics and then as a full professor for a good 30 years until his retirement in 2004. Generations of students learned economic policy from him in the form of regulatory policy, structural policy and competition policy, but also mathematical economic theory and, from the early 1990s, environmental economics and systems management. As an academic teacher, Udo Müller impressed many students with his broad knowledge, his structured and systematic approach, as well as his "thinking outside the box" of the prevailing teaching of economics and the inclusion of current problems and developments. Udo Müller, who had himself been involved in university didactics for many years, enjoyed a very high level of popularity among students overall.

In research, Udo Müller initially concentrated primarily on competition theory and competition policy, which was reflected, among other things, in journal articles in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft (1967 and 1973; today: Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) and in Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv (1968; today: Review of World Economics), in the articles "Competition Theory" and "Competition Policy", which were renowned in their day, in the Handwörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft (2nd edition, Wiesbaden 1980; Hewlett-Packard), which he co-edited. Edition, Wiesbaden 1980; ed. W. Glastetter, U. Müller, E. Mändle, R. Rettig) as well as in the book "Wettbewerb, Unternehmenskonzentration und Innovation" (together with Peter Stahlecker, Göttingen 1975). In 1987, Udo Müller was also one of the founding members of the Committee for Industrial Economics in the Verein für Socialpolitik. Especially since the 1990s, Udo Müller has attached great importance to the interdisciplinarity of his research and has increasingly devoted himself to the fields of environmental economics and evolutionary economics as well as to systems-theoretical approaches. Early on, Udo Müller recognized the growing importance of externally funded research and was very successful in this area with joint projects with the DFG (German Research Foundation), the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (German Federal Environmental Foundation), the Volkswagen Foundation, the EXPO2000 in Hanover, various ministries as well as numerous partners from industry since the mid-1990s. Already on the occasion of his retirement in 2004, numerous colleagues, students and companions honoured him with the Festschrift "Wettbewerb, Wirtschaftsordnung und Umwelt - Festschrift für Udo Müller" (Frankfurt a.M. 2004, ed. by Oliver Budzinski and Jörg Jasper).

In the approximately 30 years of his work as a university professor, Udo Müller has awarded doctorates to numerous internal and external doctoral candidates, some of whom have gone on to careers within academia and others in the private sector. In his work at the chair, Udo Müller always attached great importance to a critical and independent attitude and always gave his staff considerable freedom to develop their own scientific foci and topics. In addition, those of us who worked at his chair will always remember his wealth of ideas, his enthusiasm for new projects and ideas, and his ability to recognize higher-level connections.

Udo Müller passed away on 06 April 2016 at the age of 80. Our sympathy and thoughts are with his relatives.

 

Prof. Dr. Oliver Budzinski (Ilmenau University of Technology)

PD Dr. Dirk Fornahl (University of Bremen)

PD Dr. Jörg Jasper (EnBW)

Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg (Sartorius AG)

Prof. Dr. Henrik Orzen (University of Mannheim)

PD Dr. Markus Pasche (University of Jena)

Henning Serger

Prof. Dr. Peter Stahlecker (University of Hamburg)

Dr. Jenny Sundmacher (Sustain Consult)

Dr. Torsten Sundmacher (Sustain Consult)