Friederike Mengel

Prof. Dr. Friederike Mengel was born in Karlsruhe in 1979. After her economic studies in Mainz and Paris-X-Nanterre, she earned a doctorate at the University of Alicante with Fernando Vega Redondo being her doctoral advisor. At the moment, she is a professor at the University of Essex.

Her major fields of research include (evolutionary) game theory, social networks and models of limited rational behavior. Her work has been published in journals across all academic fields like Games and Economic Behavior or the Journal of Theoretical Biology. She was a guest researcher at Cornell University, MPI Jena, New York University, Santa Fe Institute and others.

In the course of the project, neuronal reactions to mechanisms of distribution of limitedly available resources are to be examined. As many studies display, the acceptance of “unfair” allocations highly correlates with the processes through which they materialize. It is unclear whether the acceptance of fair institutions is caused by the satisfaction with the result or by the fact that individuals repress their dissatisfaction with the result due to the nondiscriminatory routine.

The answer to this question considerably affects the attractiveness of such mechanisms when seen from a welfare perspective and the question whether procedural fair institutions are stable in the long term.