Empowering global decision-makers | ESMT Berlin research

ESMT's research findings aspire to enlighten the judgment of business leaders and policy makers, thereby improving human societies and organizations. The research output from ESMT's faculty is published in international academic journals, which are first-class in their respective fields. These research findings also provide cutting-edge and profound insights for the business community as well as the classroom through managerial publications and case studies.

ERC Starting Grant: Digital platforms - Pricing, variety and quality provision

Digital platforms: Pricing, variety and quality provision

Funding type: European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant
Funding period: 2020-2025, the new beneficiary is the European University Institute (EUI) as of September 2023
Research team: Özlem Bedre-Defolie (ESMT Berlin), Willy Lefez (ESMT Berlin), Atara Oliver (former ESMT Berlin)

Digital platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google, have become important global players. Their practices have led to significant anti-trust and regulatory scrutiny, and interventions. The existing theoretical models are not suited for the analysis of most of digital platforms as they fail to capture their important aspects and dynamics. This project’s first goal is to develop tractable and applicable models of markets with digital platforms capturing their unique features. The second goal is to investigate the implications of digital platforms’ business practices on prices, variety and quality provision to buyers, on small rivals, and on potential platform entry. The findings of this project will highlight potential distortions in these multi-billion markets and ultimately suggest effective policy recommendations for competition policy in digital markets, which can greatly improve consumer welfare in the EU.

More detailed information can be found on the official project website.

DEval and BMZ: Evaluation of a digital skills program for TVET teachers in Rwanda

Evaluation of a digital skills program for TVET teachers in Rwanda

Funding type: Research grant supported by the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) with funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Funding period: 2023-2025
Research team: Rajshri Jayaraman (ESMT Berlin), Sneha Menon (ESMT Berlin), Matthias Schündel (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Working together with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the government of Rwanda, a nation-wide digital skills training program for technical and vocational education and training (TVET) teachers in Rwanda will be evaluated.

The research project will evaluate the impact of the digital skills training program on teachers’ digital and pedagogical competence, their teaching practice, and students’ test scores. In addition, the researchers will evaluate the effectiveness of various randomly assigned behavioral incentives to motivate teachers to complete the program. Results from this project will flow into future program designs in Rwanda as well as scaling and replication in other regions of the world.

Honors and awards

May 2023: Nazli Sönmez was chosen for a 2022 M&SOM Meritorious Service Award, which recognizes her outstanding service provided over the past year for the M&SOM journal and for the professional community in general.
May 2023: Jan Nimczik will be a part of Poets&Quants’ 40 under 40 MBA Professors 2023
April 2023: Thorsten Lambertus, Managing Director DEEP - Institute for Deep Tech Innovation, was named as one of the top 100 most important figures in Berlin's economy by Tagesspiegel(in German only), online and in print.
December 20, 2022: Özlem Bedre-Defolie was awarded a total of €215,600 from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for a new research group involving 12 scientists from Germany and Austria. The title of the project is “Consumer Preferences, Consumer Mistakes, and Firm’s Response” and was awarded 2.25 milion. Prof. Bedre-Defolie as a co-scientist of the research group will lead a sub-project together with Prof. Dr. Markus Reisinger from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, titled “Consumer Behavior and Search on Platforms”.