Christian Peukert

R&D Organization and ML Applications

While visiting CESifo, Christian Peukert intends to work on a project that aims to understand innovation, adoption and diffusion of prediction technologies. In particular, he will study how firms organize the R&D of machine learning applications. Data on technology development will come from the universe of public code repositories on GitHub. This is matched to firm-level information, where in-house R&D can be measured using patent data, alliances with other firms or academia using publications of research articles.

This project builds on the micro-level evidence uncovered in a recent paper (with Ananya Sen and Jörg Claussen) which used a field experiment to quantify the economic returns to data associated with algorithmic prediction. The context is an automated recommendation system implemented by a large German news organization. The researchers tested how consumers react to personalized algorithmic recommendations versus general curation of news stories done by human experts. The baseline results show that there are decreasing economic returns to data, and that a flow of frequently updated personal data is crucial for the algorithm to outperform the human.

Mr. Peukert is an applied micro-economist working on questions in the domains of strategy, innovation and technology, and entrepreneurship. His research is mostly empirical, guided by (formal) theory. He is interested in understanding the benefits and challenges of digitization from the perspective of firms, markets and consumers, and how this shapes incentives for innovation. This includes questions related to corporate and business strategy, regulation and policy, and data and the economic effects of digital technologies. His work is motivated by real-world phenomena and the quest for practical implications for strategy and public policy. Using large-scale observational data collected from various sources, natural experiments and field experiments, he is interested in understanding the causal mechanisms that drive individual consumer and firm behavior.

Christian Peukert is an Associate Professor for Digitization, Innovation and Intellectual Property at the University of Lausanne (HEC). He was previously an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Católica-Lisbon and Senior Research Associate at ETH Zürich. Mr. Peukert holds a doctorate in Management and Economics from the LMU and is also a CESifo Research Network Affiliate.