Paul Heidhues

Paul worked on numerous topics in Industrial Organization and Competition Policy such as input-market bargaining power, merger control, and collusion. Recently, most of his research focuses on the functioning of markets when consumers are partly driven by psychological factors – such as social preferences, loss aversion, time-inconsistency, or naivete – that the classical consumer model abstracts from. He has written on how firms optimally price products and design credit contracts in response to consumers’ psychological tendencies, and investigated the implications thereof for consumer-protection regulation. Furthermore, he studied when profitable consumer exploitation can arise in seemingly competitive markets, and the implications of profitable consumer deception for firms’ innovation incentives. He also reexamined the implications of consumer mistakes for price discrimination, privacy regulation, and the welfare implications of firms collecting more and more data on consumers. Much of his ongoing and planned future research similarly focuses on consumer-protection regulation and imperfect competition driven through or interacting with consumer mistakes. In addition, he studies how individuals with a mis-specified model of the world learn from the feedback they receive.

Paul is a member of the Academic Panel of the Competition and Markets Authority of the UK, a member of the Arbeitskreis Kartellrecht of the German Antitrust Authority (Bundeskartellamt), a Research Fellow of the CEPR Programme in Industrial Organization, a Research Fellow of the CESifo Network in Behavioral Economics, and an elected member of the Industrieökonomischer Ausschuss as well as the Theoretischer Ausschuss of the Verein für Socialpolitik. Currently, he serves as an elected member on the Executive Committee of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics and as the Vize-Chairperson of the Industrieökonomischer Ausschuss of the Verein für Socialpolitik. His work appeared in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.

A detailed CV can be downloaded here