I study human culture and cooperation in relationship to the environment. In particular, I study how social norms, institutions and societies evolve, and how they are influenced by ecological and social forces. I strive to use this research to learn how to better build durable, sustainable and just institutions and societies. I use experimental economics and agent-based modeling to explore these connections, and work with lot of wonderful people.

Interested in learning how to accurately model social power, diffusion of ideas, social exchange

Topics:

Behavioural aspects of environmental problems: Use of evolutionary approaches to investigate how people react to environmental policy.
Resource scarcity
Climate-economic Models: Understand how economic agents think and decide about climate change and climate protection
Sustainable Development

Methods:

Agent-Based-Modeling
Genetic algorithms
Evolutionary economics
Behavioural economics
Ecological economics
Complexity Theory

I am a Professor in the School of Sustainability and the Director of the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment. I want to understand how people solve collective problems at different levels of scale, especially those problems related to sustainability of our environment. Our society experience unprecedented challenged to sustain common resource for future generations at a scale we have never experienced before. What makes groups cooperate? What is the role of information? How does the ecological context affect the social fabric? How do they deal with a changing environment? How can we use these insight to address global challenges? To do this research I combine behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling and case study analysis.

Interested in how technology innovation impacts people’s lives.

I’m researching agent-based modeling from a social perspective – to see how people

My PHD project focuses on understanding factors influencing individual sustainable consumption behaviour and how these factors could promote a sustainability transition.

Behavioural ecology and modelling of ant behaviour, with an emphasis on understanding how individual-level complexity affects collective decision-making