News

International climate policy often struggles with a cooperation problem: unilateral action is often rather ineffective and politically and economically risky, while effective international agreements are difficult to align. In a policy analysis in Science, Director Axel Ockenfels and a global team of co-authors coordinated by Catherine Wolfram (MIT) present a pragmatic solution: a "Climate Coalition" specifically targeting four heavy industries—steel, aluminum, cement, and nitrogen fertilizers. more

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Tonke, former Senior Research Fellow at our MPI in Bonn, has been awarded the 2026 Joachim Herz Award. Endowed with €500,000, the prize is among the most highly endowed research awards in Germany and recognizes innovative research with strong societal relevance. more

Study shows the extent to which teenagers are bypassing Australia's social media ban – and why more

Dr Sebastian Riedmiller has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for his dissertation on survey-guided policy design. His research shows how targeted information strategies can improve the effectiveness of public policies, particularly in the area of student financial aid. more

The “Deutsche Stiftung Glücksspielforschung” (German Foundation on Gambling Research, DSGF) has awarded the 2026 German Young Researcher Award on Gambling Research to Sebastian O. Schneider. The prize, endowed with €30,000, was presented on 13 April 2026, during the scientific symposium “Aspects of Human Risk Behavior” at the Literaturhaus Munich. more

On 7 May 2026, the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics will open its Decision Lab as part of the “Month of Science” and offer insights into a distinctive method of economic research: the behavioral-economics experiment. more

Ingo Isphording, Senior Research Fellow at the institute, provided expert testimony in front of the main committee of the Hessischer Landtag (state parliament of Hesse) on measures to strengthen Germany’s crisis resilience and on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. more

Large-scale study finds conclusions often diverge when hundreds of researchers reanalyze the same data more

On 26 March 2026, the German Bundestag adopted a landmark reform of the Transplantation Act, expanding the framework for living organ donation in Germany. For the first time, the law enables kidney exchange programs, allowing “crossover” donations between incompatible donor–recipient pairs. more

The renowned duo of authors, consisting of Martin G. Kocher, Governor of the Austrian National Bank, and Matthias Sutter, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics, speak from practical experience, since they worked together for many years at the Institute of Public Finance at the University of Innsbruck. In this book, they highlight the advantages of cooperation and trust for a successful future. more

With the retirement of our former director Christoph Engel and the closure of his legal department, our institute now has a clearly economic focus. In the future, our research will concentrate fully on questions in behavioral economics, including the analysis ... more

Together with Yulia Evsyukova and Wladislaw Mill, he is recognized for the study “LinkedOut? A Field Experiment on Discrimination in Job Network Formation,” which demonstrates through a large-scale field experiment that LinkedIn profiles with darker skin tones systematically receive fewer connection requests. more

Theresa Schaetze and Jana Tissen have been awarded the Add-on Fellowship for Science and Transfer by the Joachim Herz Foundation.
The fellowship supports outstanding scientists working on interdisciplinary research projects with social relevance in the field of “Resources of the Future.” more

A new paper by Matthias Sutter and Sebastian Schneider has been accepted for publication and is now forthcoming in the American Economic Review – one of the most prestigious journals in economics. more

The Max Planck Institute warmly congratulates Philippe Aghion on receiving this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Aghion, one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of growth and innovation economics, served for many years as a member of the Institute’s Advisory Council (2004–2014). more

Our emeritus director Martin Hellwig has been confirmed once again as a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). This recognition highlights his outstanding contributions to economic research and his long-standing engagement with the CEPR. more

Johannes Kruse is researching the cases in which AI can be used in the justice system. What can AI do in court? What is smart sentencing, and how can AI be trained so that it does not hallucinate court judgments? more

JProf. Amelie Schiprowski and Prof. Johannes Wohlfart, two members of the institute and of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy have each been awarded one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grants worth €1.5 million. The institute congratulates!  more

Although more and more students are formally eligible for BAföG, take-up remains low. A joint study by the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT has identified the main reasons: Misperceptions about their own eligibility, the funding conditions and the repayment terms prevent many students from even applying. more

The Adenauer School of Government (ASG) will combine cutting-edge research with innovative teaching in the future. The establishment of the ASG is made possible by an extensive and long-term collaboration with the Alfred Landecker Foundation. more

Armin Steinbach, who wrote his habilitation thesis in law while working at the institute, and then became professor at HEC Paris, has just been appointed Chief Economist to the German Ministery of Finance. more

Felix Rusche has been awarded the 2025 Best Paper Award for the top scientific article on public policy evaluation, presented by FBK-IRVAPP. He is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Mannheim and will be joining Matthias Sutter’s research group in September. more

Whether it's technological and economic transformations or, more generally, ‘crises’ and their consequences, many developments currently shaping the discourse can no longer be addressed with vague trust in social self-regulation. At the latest when lives and livelihoods are threatened, it seems clear that the state cannot remain inactive. more

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On 18 March 2025, Paul Milgrom of Stanford University gave a lecture entitled ‘Auction Theory at Work: Internet Display Advertising’. Paul Milgrom shared his extensive experience in designing online advertising space allocation, addressing real-world challenges in auction theory. He explored key issues such as bid aggregation by demand-side platforms, refined ad targeting, leveraging past auctions to optimize future designs, and strategic bidding across multiple exchanges. more

The institute warmly congratulates Matthias Sutter. more

The University of Copenhagen has awarded Christoph Engel an honorary doctorate in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of law & economics. more

The economist from the University of Cologne and senior research fellow of the institute will be the first woman to head the German National Academy of Sciences. During her term of office, she will strive to increase the impact of academic discussions on policy and society and enhance cooperation with national and international partners. more

The institute – namely Matthias Sutter’s research group on Experimental Economics – organizes the next Seedec Conference 2025 in Bonn with the Norwegian School of Economics. more

At its annual conference in Torino, the European Association for Law and Economics has bestowed its lifetime award to Christoph Engel. more

Traditional welfare economics works with the assumption of the fully rational economic agent (homo economicus) whose preferences are fixed: that is, they are not influenced by their economic environment. To the contrary, Carl Christian von Weizsäcker presents a theory of welfare economics that maintains the principles of normative individualism while allowing for adaptive or changeable preferences. more

Behavioral law has evolved from singular refinements within economic analysis into a theory of assumptions for the whole of jurisprudence. Making knowledge about individual behavior accessible to doctrine and regulatory practice requires digesting empirical literature for the purposes of the law. more

This book presents current insights from the field of behavioral economics to understand better the "human factor" in professional life and to enable successful cooperation. more

This book presents current insights from the field of behavioral economics to understand better the "human factor" in professional life and to enable successful cooperation. more

In this joint interview, Anne Peters and Axel Ockenfels discuss legal and economic approaches to tackling the global climate crisis more

The Econometric Society announced that it has awarded the 2024 Frisch Medal to Dennis Egger, Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus and Michael Walker for their paper, “General equilibrium effects of cash transfers: experimental evidence from Kenya” which was published in Econometrica in November 2022. more

Following his appointment in June 2019, Christoph Engel has now been formally inaugurated as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. more

A jury made up of members of the Wirtschaft und Wettbewerb (Competition Law and Economics) editorial and advisory board (including Prof. Daniel Zimmer, University of Bonn, and Prof. Andreas Heinemann, University of Zurich) has presented Johannes Kruse with the WuW Award "Future of Competition". more

An artificial intelligence that checks university admissions, distributes refugees among municipalities or gives the go-ahead for police operations? Pascal Langenbach is researching how fair we think it is when machines make important decisions: more

In the latest ranking of economists in Wirtschaftswoche, researchers from our MPI perform excellently.
In the ranking of the strongest researchers under the age of 40, Christopher Roth is in 1st place.
In the ranking of the economists currently conducting the most research (2019-2023), Christoph Roth is in 7th place, Matthias Sutter in 27th place and Axel Ockenfels in 92nd place. In terms of lifetime achievement, Martin Hellwig is in 2nd place, Matthias Sutter in 36th place and Axel Ockenfels in 95th place. more

Sebastian Tonke and Sebastian Riedmiller have been awarded Add-on Fellowships for Interdisciplinary Economics by the Joachim Herz Stiftung. more

In cooperation with the University of Leiden (NL), Dorothee Mischkowski has received a postdoctoral fellowship within the EU’s Marie Curie program for her project “From low- to high-cost cooperation: Increasing costly cooperation behavior through internalized low-cost prosociality”. more

Axel Ockenfels, professor at the University of Cologne, will become a new director at the MPI Collective Goods in Bonn in August 2023. He will establish a new department there, to be called "Economic Design & Behavior". Its aim will be to design market, incentive, and decision architectures, based on modern behavioral research. Prof. Dr. Ockenfels will thus complement the departments of Prof. Dr. Matthias Sutter and Prof. Dr. Christoph Engel at the institute, which focus on behavioral research from an economic and legal perspective. He will continue to teach and conduct research at the University of Cologne... more

Dan Nagin, Fellow at the Institute, has just been elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious badges of honor in US academia. The institute is proud of its fellow, and extends its warmest congratulations! more

Matthias Sutter, Werner Güth and Martin Hellwig among the best scientists in the arena of Economics and Finance more

Matthias Sutter provides insights into the current state of research on this topic: women tend to avoid competitive situations on the job. However, when it comes to higher salaries, accepting and performing in competitive situations is often very crucial. more

"Is being successful at salary negotiations discrimination? A ruling by the German Federal Labour Court has some people up in arms: Without being asked, a company should have paid a woman as much as a man who bargained for more." more

In the latest issue of the Journal of Legal Studies, two papers from researchers have been published who currently work at the institute, or who have written the paper while working at the institute. more

In his new book, Matthias Sutter, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, presents current insights from the field of behavioural economics to better understand "human factor" in professional life and to enable successful cooperation. more

This book presents current insights from the field of behavioral economics to understand better the "human factor" in professional life and to enable successful cooperation. It provides a comprehensive perspective on the "big picture" by analyzing what makes people "tick," how they respond to incentives (monetary or non-monetary), and what that means for working together – or against each other – at work. more

To what extent can legal concepts and legal decision-making be transferred into mathematical models? Frederike Zufall and her co-authors Rampei Kimura and Linyu Peng have pursued this question for the legal concept of balancing interests. They developed two mathematical models to represent the decision of weighing two conflicting rights against each other. more

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Information provision over the phone saves lives – A randomized controlled trial to contain COVID-19 in rural Bangladesh at the pandemic’s onset more

In a clustered randomized controlled trial in 20 large Turkish companies and over 3,000 headquarter employees, Matthias Sutter and his co-authors Sule Alan and Gözde Corekcioglu show how workplace climate can be improved and turnover be reduced. The training intervention improves in particular the leader-subordinate relationship. more

On August 11, president elect, Prof. Patrick Cramer, and general secretary of the Max Planck Society, Dr. Simone Schwanitz, visited our institute. more

Christoph Engel held a Minerva Lecture at the MPI for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg more

In a large-scale experiment in rural Bangledesh Matthias Sutter and his co-authors Shyamal Chowdhury and Klaus F. Zimmermann find substantial intergenerational persistence of economic preferences. more

Bloomberg News: "They Failed a Trust Test, Then Chose Finance. Any Questions?"
A study by four business and economics professors based in Germany and Austria finds that those with low scores in a trust game are more likely to go to work in the financial sector. Does that matter? more

The German Research Foundation (DFG) just announced that senior research fellow Hanjo Hamann is among this year's recipients of the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the most prestigious award for early career researchers in Germany. The Prize is awarded annually to researchers across all academic disciplines as an early distinction for successfully establishing an independent scientific career following a research doctorate. more

This book presents current insights from the field of behavioral economics to understand better the "human factor" in professional life and to enable successful cooperation. It provides a comprehensive perspective on the "big picture" by analyzing what makes people "tick," how they respond to incentives (monetary or non-monetary), and what that means for working together – or against each other – at work. more

Prof. Dr. Matthias Heinz, part-time member of our Experimental Economics Group, has received an ERC Starting grant, i.e., one of the most prestigious and highly-endowed research grants in Europe. In his ERC project „Managing People - How Employees’ Social Preferences Shape the Returns to Management Practices” Matthias Heinz analyzes the causal effects of management practices and studies to what extent employees’ social preferences shape the returns of the considered management practices. more

How cool would it be if you could read minds? Only that's not really possible, is it? Social psychologist Rima-Maria Rahal explains how science might have a solution. more

Daniel Salicath joined the MPI for Research on Collective Goods in 2017 as a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Matthias Sutter and Prof. Bettina Rockenbach. more

Shambhavi Priyam joined the MPI for Research on Collective Goods in late 2017 as a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Matthias Sutter and Prof. Axel Ockenfels. more

57 clusters of excellence, 1 podcast. On a regular basis, "Exzellent erklärt" reports from one of the research clusters that receive funding under the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. more

A Covid-19 infection in the family leads to a reduction in trust and in the willingness to cooperate in adolescents from socioeconomically weaker families more

Maj-Britt joined the MPI for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in January 2017 as a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Oliver Kirchkamp and Prof. Christoph Engel, within the IMPRS Uncertainty. more

Cornelius started his PhD studies at our institute within the joint program of the Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World (IMPRS Uncertainty) and the University of Cologne (Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences, CGS) in October 2016. more

The European Academy of Sociology (EAS) awards Michael Seebauer and his co-authors the 2021 EAS Prize for Best Article for their publication "The Role of Reciprocity in the Creation of Reputation." more

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Rima-Maria Rahal receives funding for the project “Good Together” from the Hans Sauer Foundation's special funding program "The Crisis as an Opportunity?”. more

The "Gesellschaft für experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung (GfeW)" awards Stefan Schmidt a Reinhard Selten scholarship in the amount of 1500 Euro for his research project "Flag to Wave: Status-Seeking Behavior in Groups". more

Matthias Sutter explains how the seemingly old-fashioned virtue of patience leads to success in life. more

In the ranking for lifetime achievement (individuals and institutions in and from the German-speaking world according to articles in scientific journals), Prof. Hellwig ranks second and Prof. Sutter 39th. more

In this year's ranking of top economists, published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Matthias Sutter is in 42nd place. more

Podcast with Susann Fiedler (in German)
A basic income? Some say it's a social hammock, others say it's a solution to social problems. Susann Fiedler, head of the research group "Economic Cognition", and others are conducting the first ... more

The Max Planck Institutes for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn proudly announce that, under the auspices of Max Planck Law, Professor Dan Nagin has been appointed as Fellow. more

Study with respondents from 42 very different countries shows that fellow citizens are generally preferred more

Quantitative Economics is a journal of the Econometric Society, founded  to promote studies that aim at a unification of the theoretical-quantitative and empirical-quantitative approaches to economic problems. more

The University of Jena awards Yoan Hermstrüwer the PhD Prize 2021 for his thesis: "Engineering Games in the Public Interest - Essays in Experimental Law and Market Design". more

The right to determine whether to go first or second in a penalty shoout improves the chances of winning more

Cohesion is the glue of every life together. About civil courage, the group decisions of baboons and the cooperation of bacteria. more

The online portal The Conversation reports on a recent study, conducted by Matthias Sutter and his co-authors asking whether it is the right to determine the sequence of moves in a penalty shootout rather than the actual sequence of moves that matters in order to win. more

Starting in the fall, Rima-Maria Rahal will be a member of the Young ZiF, a network of postdocs through which Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) promotes exchange between outstanding young scholars from different disciplines who have a special interest in interdisciplinary cooperation. more

June 1st launched the nationwide first pilot project investigating the individual and social effects of a UBI (1,200.00 EUR/month) on recipients in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that will last for 3 years. more

Podcast with Matthias Sutter (in German) more

Intentionally foregoing information can be a good decision for both dividuals and society more

Deliberately ignoring information can sometimes lead to better decisions. This can also be the case in the relationship between the market and the state—that is, in whether the state should intervene in the economy to correct for a market failure, for example. Economist Felix Bierbrauer presents examples from welfare economics and considers the potential effects on fairness, freedom, and individual motivation. more

We live in a knowledge society in which science and education is of particular importance. But under certain circumstances, we all benefit from deliberate ignorance. The Max Planck directors Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel explain why deliberately foregoing information in certain areas should even be prescribed and taught. more

Armin Steinbach has accepted an offer to join HEC Paris as Full Professor from September 2021. more

I do not want to see that! On first hearing, this may not seem wise. Even less should deliberately ignoring available information be praised by scientists: isn’t science about deepening knowledge? Yet people often shield themselves from information, for instance as they do not want to be scared, or biased. In a Strüngmann-Forum ... more

Hanjo Hamann is the first legal scholar to receive the academics.de Junior Award and is named Rising Researcher of the Year 2020. This prize is awarded by the German University Association (Deutscher Hochschulverband) during the "Gala of German Science" for outstanding commitment to science and research. more

In the broadcast “Warum wir uns an Hygieneregeln halten oder nicht" ["Why we follow hygiene rules or not"] Sebastian O. Schneider was interviewed on the question why some people adhere to the measures to fight Covid-19, and how to help everyone follow these measures. more

Do performance comparisons make you sick in the long run? more

Lukas Kiessling received the Prize for the best PhD thesis in Economics of Education completed in 2019/2020.   more

In February 2020, Sebastian O. Schneider of the Experimental Economics group was awarded a scholarship by Daimler and Benz Foundation for his project proposal to investigate smartphone usage and its consequences among adolescents. more

Stefanie Egidy has been awarded a competitive postdoctoral scholarship by the Daimler und Benz Stiftung for her work on "Strategic Litigation in a Democracy“. more

The institute is proud to learn that one of its former senior research fellows, Jens Frankenreiter, after having been a fellow at Columbia University, will join one of the top 20 US law schools, Washington University in St. Louis, as an Associate Professor. more

Matthias Sutter gave a one-hour interview on Radio Vorarlberg: "How we become successful through patience". more