Keynote Speakers

Clemens Puppe (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) — Lecture on January 30th

Multi-Dimensional Social Choice under Frugal Information: Imprecise Bayesian Foundations for the Tukey Median

Abstract: We study a voting model with partial information in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents’ top choices plus qualitative background conditions on preferences. The resulting uncertainty is modeled in terms of the imprecise Bayesian beliefs of an evaluator who adopts an ex-ante Condorcet criterion. We show that for an appropriate class of imprecise beliefs, ex-ante Condorcet winners exist and refine the set of Tukey medians (Tukey, 1975). Tukey medians enjoy notable robustness to belief misspecification, and are distinguished also from a mechanism design perspective.

Clemens Puppe studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin and received his Ph.D. from the University of Karlsruhe with a thesis on individual decision making under uncertainty. After a post-doc year at Harvard he joined the Department of Economics at the University of Vienna where he received his habilitation in 1997. From 1997 to 2003 he was associate professor of economics at Bonn University, and since 2003 he is full professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (formerly, University of Karlsruhe).

His research centers around topics in microeconomic theory, especially decision theory and social choice theory. In either area, he is interested both in normative questions and in issues related to behavioral analysis.

Clemens Puppe held visiting positions at a number of institutions abroad, among them the University of California at Davis, the University of Melbourne, the University of Auckland and the Université Paris-Dauphine. In the academic year 2021/22, he was appointed „Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow“ at Balliol College, Oxford University. For the academic year 2024/25 he serves as „Invited Distinguished Research Fellow“ of the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS) in Budapest.

Clemens Puppe is co-editor of the "Handbook for Rational and Social Choice" for Oxford University Press. From 2012 - 2024 he served as managing and coordinating editor of Social Choice and Welfare, respectively.  Currently, he is member of the Editorial Board of Economics and Philosophy.

He served as dean (2008 - 2012) and vice-dean ("Prodekan", 2004 - 2008 and 2014 - 2016) of the Department of Economics and Management at KIT. From 2018 - 2022 he was elected member of the senate of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Since 2023, he is the dean of studies responsible for the new study course “Digital Economics”.

Learn more about Clemens Puppe and his work on his homepage.

Paula Gobbi (Université Libre de Bruxelles) — Lecture on January 31st

She is also a CEPR research affiliate, and a member of the EEA research committee.

Her research fields are Demographic Economics, Economic History, Development and Growth.

In 2020, she received an ERC Starting Grant on the topic "Inheritance, Demographics, and Economic Development".

Learn more about Paul Gobbi and her work on her homepage.