We wish all our friends, partners, and colleagues a blessed fasting month. May you celebrate it with your beloved ones being safe, well and happy.

The ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, one of the world’s largest information centers for economic literature, just published a commentary of our directors at its lead journal Wirtschaftsdienst. They critically reflect on the vaccination journey and discuss potential barriers for the “willing” from a behavioral economics perspective.

Full commentary in German language: Impfabsichten: Sie müssen umgesetzt werden!

A brief summary in English language is available here.

The Values 20 has officially launched its G20 engagement process in 2021 under the Italian Presidency.

Join our global community of practitioners, experts and behavioral scientists on the journey to bring evidence-based, human-centric policies to the forefront of global decision-making.

More on https://values20.org/

Online experimentation is an important tool in behavioral economic research. Our affiliates Prof. Dr. Marcus Giamattei and Prof. Dr. Johann Graf Lambsdorff invite interested researchers, lecturers, and teachers to learn more about ClassEx, a free online tool for interactive surveys and classroom experiments used in more than 60 countries.

Webinar participants will learn how to use ClassEx to design, program, and implement online experiments, especially for teaching purposes in economics and social sciences.

More information on the webinar series is available on https://classex.de/webinars/.

Excellent results for Passau’s Master in International Economics and Business (IEBS)

In the latest CHE and Times Higher Education rankings, the School of Business, Economics and Information Systems at Passau University significantly improved its positioning, now competing at eye-level with highly renowned business schools and faculties from around the globe. The school attained the 10th rank in Germany and 5th place in Bavaria (THE ranking). Especially, its Master “International Economics and Business (IEBS)” received outstanding ratings in the categories “scientific relevance”, “supervision”, and “foreign exchange” (CHE ranking).

More information is available in the official press releases: THE ranking and CHE ranking (partly in German language only).

We wish all of you a Merry Christmas and all the best for 2021.

As part of the 7^th “Behavioral Economics and the Seven Deadly Sins”, the Chair of Economic Theory has published a new wave of student papers.

Topics address behavioral insights on hand hygiene, slacktivism, moral cleansing, or prosociality.

Interested? Then check out the papers on https://www.wiwi.uni-passau.de/wirtschaftstheorie/forschung/studentische-diskussionspapiere/ (just scroll down to the bottom of the page…).

Happy reading!

We are delighted to announce that our article “Behavioral Insights for Humanitarian Aid and Relief: A selection of Case Studies to combat COVID-19” has been published in the International Journal of Humanitarian Studies, the academic journal of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid & Relief Centre.

In the article, our directors Dr. Manuel Schubert and Dr. Julia Stauf discuss how behavioral insights can be applied in humanitarian aid and relief. In light of the COVID-19 crisis, they present a selection of case studies that could help to improve social distancing, hand washing and information agency.[i] The article aims to serve as a source of inspiration and encouragement for practitioners to give behavioral insights interventions a try in humanitarian work.

The complete issue can be downloaded here.

[i] The case studies are based on articles and papers available till May 2020.

Online experimentation is an important tool in behavioral economic research. Our affiliate Marcus Giamattei and his colleagues just published a paper on LIONESS Lab, a new platform for online experiments.

The platform allows researchers to develop, test, run, and share interactive experiments – covering the full range of behavioral economics topics. The platform is a joint project of the University of Nottingham, the University of Passau and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin. It is currently used by more than 300 institutions in over 50 countries.

Learn more about LIONESS Lab on https://lioness-lab.org/

22^nd place among the best young universities worldwide and 2^nd place in Germany

Behavia‘s academic incubator and alma mater the University of Passau has ecured another top result in the Times Higher Education (THE) Ranking for 2020. Among the universities aged 50 or younger, Passau came in 22^nd (out of 414) and 2^nd among all German universities.

Find more information in the official press release (in German language).