Microeconomics, Industrial Organization, and Environmental Economics

Welcome to the Chair for Microeconomics, Industrial Organization, and Environmental Economics. Here, we study theoretical and applied microeconomics with a special focus on the following subjects:

Industrial Organization:

  • Competition, investment and innovation
    (recent and future focus: relation between the intensity of competition and investments into R&D and worker training; interaction of investment decisions with financial constraints; theory and laboratory experiments)
  • Organizational Design
    (recent focus: decentralization vs. centralization, assignment of responsibility, effects of reciprocity)
  • Vertical industry structures
    (recent focus: explanation of vertical structure in successive oligopolies; relation to investment decisions)
  • Procurement auctions and regulation of network industries
    (past focus: provision of investment incentives and role of access prices;
    more recent and future focus: role of competition for the market in the procurement of railway services, in particular, empirical studies for Germany)
  • Market dynamics and mergers
    (recent focus: endogenous market dominance through investments and/or mergers; mergers under asymmetric information)
  • Games with strategic complementarities
    (focus: applications to industrial organization; relevance for the interpretation of experimental evidence)

Environmental Economics:

  • The Political Economy of Environmental Policy Instruments
    (recent focus: effect of lobbying on environmental policy choice, determinants of acceptance chances for environmental policy instruments)
  • Transportation and the environment
    (recent focus: empirical analysis of the effects of supporting public transport on environmental outcomes)