Marc-Felix Otto

Marc-Felix Otto is a Foundation Council Member of the Free Cities Foundation, having supported the idea of contract-based government for over 20 years and authored scientific articles on the topic of coercion together with Rahim Taghizadegan. He is a Partner at The Advisory House, a leading management consultancy to the energy industry.

The papers with Taghizadegan, published in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, try to give coercion the treatment Austrian economics gives exchange: a praxeology of force alongside the praxeology of trade, and an account of why cycles of violence recur. It is an unusual thing for a working consultant to spend his evenings on.

His day job is closer to the same question than it looks. He advises European energy companies, an industry whose returns depend less on engineering than on what governments decide, and in 2023 he published a book with Springer on managing political risk: how a firm works out what political exposure it is already carrying, and what it can do about it before the decision lands.

That is the practical form of the argument for Free Cities. A business can hedge a currency and insure a factory, but the rules it operates under are the one input it usually cannot price, and a jurisdiction that binds itself by contract is a way of pricing it.

He holds a doctorate in physics from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, and lives with his wife and two sons in Switzerland.