Political institutions and collective decisions
Part of this research area includes a project that looks at the impact of political institutions on public policy. In particular, we are interested in the role of institutions in the incentives to become a politician and how these incentives depend on individual characteristics such as gender or different backgrounds. This includes research questions on how such incentives to enter politics affect the quality of political elites and political outcomes. See, for example, "Honesty and Self-Selection into Cheap Talk."
Another part of this research deals with the theoretical analysis of voting rules and their application to empirical data from regional elections. This includes examining the empirical relevance of various theoretical results from social choice theory and the practical complexity of voting rules. See "Does the Rule Matter? A comparison of preference elicitation methods and voting rules based on data from an Austrian regional parliamentary election in 2019" or "Evaluative Voting or Classical Voting Rules: Does it make a difference? Empirical evidence for consensus among voting rules".
We also focus on axiomatic and algorithmic approaches to collective decision theory. In particular, we deal with normative questions such as the fair division of indivisible objects or the ranking of object sets. See "Using the Borda Rule for Ranking Sets of Objects" or "Two-Person Fair Division of Indivisible Items: Bentham vs. Rawls on Envy".