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)