Paul Heidhues

Paul Heidhues is an ESMT distinguished affiliate professor and a professor of Behavioral and Competition Economics at Dusseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE). Before joining DICE, Paul was the first holder of the Lufthansa Chair in Competition and Regulation, and the director of PhD studies at ESMT from 2010 to 2016. He was an associate professor for Economic Theory at University of Bonn from 2005 to 2010 and a research fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) from 1999 to 2005. Paul received his Habilitation from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2005 and his PhD in Economics from Rice University, Houston, Texas in 2000.

Paul worked on numerous topics in Industrial Organization and Competition Policy such as input-market bargaining power, merger control, and collusion. More recently, much of his work focuses on the functioning of markets when consumers are partly driven by psychological factors – such as social preferences, loss aversion, time-inconsistency, or naivete – that the classic consumer model abstracts from. Among other things, he has written on how firms optimally price products and design credit contracts in response to consumers' psychological tendencies, and he has investigated the implications thereof for consumer-protection regulation.

Paul is a member of the Academic Panel of the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK, a member of the Arbeitskreis Kartellrecht of the German Antitrust Authority (Bundeskartellamt), a Research Fellow of the CEPR Programme in Industrial Organization, a Research Fellow of the CESifo Network in Behavioral Economics, and an elected member of the Industrieökonomischer Ausschuss as well as the Theoretischer Ausschuss of the Verein für Socialpolitik. His work appeared in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.