Research of the Research group Information, Incentives, Inequality cover a broad spectrum of topics, from prosociality and inequality to media and political economy.

Engaging in prosocial behavior plays a crucial role in addressing societal challenges. It plays a key role for such important problems of today like reducing global poverty, societal polarization or tackling climate change. We study donor’s motives and strategies to promote prosociality. The main current project is PROSOCIAL.

The research on inequality is mainly concerned with gender gaps. Gender gaps persist in the labour market. According to the European Institute for Gender Equality (2023), although there has been some convergence over the last few decades, the pace of progress has been frustratingly slow. Women still face setbacks on various dimensions such as employment, income, time or representation in positions of power. We study the sources of gender gaps—they may pertain to social norms, preferences, institutional design, or discrimination—and potential remedies (e.g. information, affirmative action, incentives). The main current project is Gender Gaps in the Labour Market: The Role of Skills, Implicit Biases and Task Allocation is a project within the DFG Research Group in Berlin “Transformations in the Labor Market: Skills Shortages, Lack of Skills, and the Role of Policy”.

Finally, scientific and technological changes in recent decades have made the world more interconnected and complex. While accurate knowledge and a good understanding of the world are necessary to meet these challenges, the media, which are expected to provide diversified information about the world, are in deep crisis. In particular, social media have been shown to increase the emergence and spread of biased and fake news, contributing to polarized worldviews. Growing political polarization increases the risk of democratic instability, rising populism, declining political trust, and lower economic growth. Our research focuses on the effects of the media and information on opinions, preferences, and behavior, and on the rising support of populist and extremist parties. The main current project is funded within the Lebniz Best Minds grant competition.

To investigate these questions, our research relies on clean causal identification in experimental settings. We design and conduct laboratory, online, survey, and field experiments. While much of our research is based on field experiments, which allow for higher external validity and realistic settings, we also turn to other formats when field experiments are not feasible, or when we want to understand the mechanisms and have more control over the environment. In addition, we are fond of analyzing natural experiments using appropriate identification methods. Finally, historical data, web-scraped data, and text-as-data complete our methodological portfolio. Our diversity of methodological skills allows us to focus on a variety of different questions, not based on the method, but rather based on the fundamental importance of the research question.