Leaving GSBC :-( Joining MPI :-)

This week is my last week working at the GSBC (University of Jena) and from next week onward I will be working at the Max Planck Institute of Economics, also in Jena.

I am very happy of course to join Professor Werner Güth‘s Strategic Interaction research group, but I will really miss working at GSBC as well. I was very happy to work there and I am particularly thankful to Professor Uwe Cantner, director of the GSBC, and to Dr. Kristina von Rhein, who was the research coordinator at GSBC for most of my stay there. They both took very good care of me and I have been very happy working with them!

During my stay at GSBC, I got 3 papers and one book chapter published (here, here, here and here). I also worked with Caterina Giannetti, Paolo Crosetto and Gerhard Riener on a total of three research papers, two of which are now under submission (here and here).

I went to a number of international conferences (EEA 2009, EARIE 2011 and Econometric Society 2011), workshops (ACLE 2012, Crem-Economix 2010), participated in two excellent summer schools (at the MPI of Economics here in 2009 and at the MPI for Human Development in Berlin in 2011), organized a workshop on the economics of open source software in 2010 (with Kristina von Rhein and Sebastian von Engelhardt), and had great fun organizing a hand-on introduction to experimental economics with Paolo Crosetto at last year’s Night of Science in Jena (people played our experiment, introduced with a poster here).

The PhD programme at GSBC is certainly a program I would rank highly in terms of the quality of the research environment being provided there. There is a summer schools every year (in a castle, no less!), where PhD students present their work and train their techniques (link for two years ago). There are seminars every week with presentations by external presenters, and a school day every year on a specific topic (this year about migration). There are also research assistants available (I was in charge of that along with Kristina), money for going to conferences, and last but not least, advanced courses in a variety of specialized fields (see here for current list). I was particularly impressed by the very good courses in econometrics and experimental methods being led by Professor Oliver Kirchkamp, but there were also courses in a variety of other topics. Econometrics is certainly something I started to more or less understand only since I came here.

The crowd of PhD students in floors 1 and 3 of the building at Bachstrasse 18k, where the GSBC resides, is also quite impressive. There are not only PhD students from the GSBC, but also from the EIC, which specializes on the economics of innovation, and from the IMPRS, which focuses on decisions under uncertainty. Students come from the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Chile, Brazil, Nigeria, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, United States, Russia, Netherland, Ghana, Belarus, etc… There are even some Germans there! Each of those schools has its own research presentations, seminars, summer schools, courses… which means that there is always something new going on, always interesting seminars to attend, and many opportunities to socialize as well!

So anyway, I am remaining in Jena and will keep on benefiting from its very good research environment, especially given the excellent interplay between the Max Planck Institute and the University. For my work at the MPI, I plan to collect a new, more detailed panel dataset on the activity of bloggers to keep on refining my work with Caterina Giannetti. I also am working on two ideas for experiments, one following on my paper with Paolo Crosetto, the other dealing with the perception of fairness (details still secret!). This should keep me busy for a while!

GSBC summer school

We (the whole of the GSBC) spent a fairy tale kind of week on our first annual summer school at the Oppurg Castle in Thuringia. Well, that is, if fairy tales involve group work, deadlines, frantic search for information on the Internet(s) and much fumbling about trying to connect and translate ideas from many disciplines.

The group I was involved with had as its broad theme “innovation”. The first day was spent trying to agree on a “grid” (the “holy grid”, as it was jokingly referred to afterwards) to analyze innovation processes. Less work was spent trying to define “innovation”, as this was left as a matter of reflection when analyzing case studies, chosen by the PhD students, of what we suspected were instances of innovation.

The two chosen case studies were about “family constellations“, a method for spiritual healing propagated mainly by Bert Hellinger, and the Hulda project, an itinerant science and art festival that travelled by boat from Stockhom to Istanbul. Those were two really interesting and original cases I very much enjoyed hearing about. In the last day before presenting the results, we devoted some work to finding a consistent way to present both cases, compare them and find issues with the conceptual tools that we used in their analysis.

Particularly interesting was developing an input-process-output-outcome innovation cycle model, whereby the context of the innovation was first analyzed, then the way the innovation was developed, then how the innovation was embodied and put on the market, and finally the effect the innovation had on its environment, feeding back into a new cycle of innovation. Whether this model was too broad, that is, applicable to any development process, whether innovative or not, was a question left in the air after the end of the summer school.

Poster for the GSBC School Day on 15th of April 2010

Along with other post-docs at the GSBC, I prepared a poster for the GSBC School Day on 15th of April. This is what I came up with:

View this document on Scribd

In the corners are the themes linking the different topics I have written on. I provide short summaries of findings for each different topics.

The presentation follows the arrows, but there is no special place to begin from, and one could also go in the other direction!

The background logo is that of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, where I work.