Curriculum Vitae

Publikationen | Publications

Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Gemeinschaftsgütern

University of Michigan (PSI Designing a New Global Refugee Protection System)

My research explores how behavioral science, law and economics, and artificial intelligence can inform legal design, legal reasoning, and the solution of social problems. Working at the intersection of law, economics, and computer science, I apply empirical, experimental, and computational methods to study how people perceive and respond to legal and judicial decision-making, how machine learning illuminates legal reasoning, and how market design can improve legal institutions. The overarching question, which I call mechanical justice, is: When justice is operationalized by a mechanism or an algorithm, does it stay efficient and fair, and legitimate?

A first strand, rooted in behavioral law and economics, uses experimental methods to study how people perceive and respond to legal and judicial decisions. It includes the human–AI fairness gap—people's tendency to evaluate automated legal proceedings as less procedurally fair than human-led ones—and the ways legal rules shape behavior around regulation, democracy, compliance, privacy, and repugnant markets.

A second strand applies machine learning and natural language processing to law. I participate in the construction of legal benchmarks, explore how large language models reason about legal problems, study their biases in normative contexts and ways to improve their legal outputs, and use machine-learning classifiers to analyze judicial reasoning and to detect unlawful conduct such as bid-rigging cartels.

A third strand draws on economic theory, observational data, and experimental methods to study how allocation mechanisms—from school choice to refugee protection—and the appeals that govern them can balance efficiency, fairness, and strategy-proofness while remaining behaviorally robust. My habilitation, Mechanical Justice, develops a comprehensive framework for the design of public matching markets.

I publish in peer-reviewed journals across economics and psychology (e.g., The Economic Journal; Games and Economic Behavior; Psychology, Public Policy, and Law), law journals (e.g., Journal of Legal Analysis; NYU Journal of Law & Liberty), and computer science venues (e.g., International Conference on Learning Representations; Artificial Intelligence and Law).