Elisabeth Schulte is professor of Institutional Economics. Her main research interest is devoted to understanding the link between the design of the institutional framework that governs the interaction within a group and the degree of information usage within the group. Bounded rationality, preference heterogeneity among group members, and time constraints are obstacles to efficient information generation and information revelation. Elisabeth Schulte’s research aims to shed light on their
consequences for efficient information usage within a given institutional framework on the one hand, and to identify institutional arrangements that favor informed decision making on the other hand. She analyzes strategic information acquisition and communication behavior from a formal-theoretical perspective. Taking into account political-economy constraints on institutional change, she is interested in mechanisms to extract and to aggregate decentralized bits of information.

Matthias Verbeck is research assistant at the chair of Institutional Economics. In his doctoral dissertation he elaborates on the question of how dispersed information can be aggregated best in situations of collective decision making. He therefore is interested in all kinds of “wisdom-of-crowds”-phenomena, particularly in prediction markets.  Since markets are well known to be a very efficient tool for aggregating information, Matthias Verbeck devotes his research to the question if and
how market based mechanisms could also be used to enhance the quality and speed of collective decision making.