Arno Apffelstaedt is a postdoctoral researcher in Behavioral Economics at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne. He is also Associated Member of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets and Public Policy at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne. Prior to joining the University of Cologne, he earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the Universität Hamburg. He spent part of his doctoral studies as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Berlin Doctoral Program of Economics and Management Science, as a Visiting Research Student at the London School of Economics, and as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.

As a behavioral economist, Arno Apffelstaedt is concerned with the question of how social behavior and social norms are related to and shaped by group conformity, image concerns, and political institutions.
His research relies both on formal microeconomic theories to model human behavior and on empirical observations gathered through economic experiments. In addition to social behavior and social norms, Arno Apffelstaedt is also interested in how psychological phenomena, such as context effects, influence market outcomes and political decisions.

During his fellowship, his research focus is on exploring how social behavior and norms change in response to external circumstances, on the role of group identities, and on how groups construct “narratives” to morally justify their behaviors and worldviews.

His collaboration partners are Lydia Mechtenberg, Professor for Economics (especially Microeconomics) at Universität Hamburg as well as Bernd Simon, Professor for Social Psychology and Political Psychology at Kiel University and member of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg.

Arno Apffelstaedt’s HIAS Fellowship is funded by the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg.