Director Research
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Goerg
Sebastian J. Goerg is an economist specializing in behavioral and experimental economics. Since 2026, he is Director of Research at the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions. He is also Associate Professor of Economics at the TUM Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability, Technical University of Munich (since 2018), and a Research Fellow at IZA Network (since 2017).
For more than 20 years, Sebastian J. Goerg has been researching how individuals make decisions, with a particular focus on the psychological and economic drivers of motivation, norm compliance, behavioral change, and consumer behavior.
His work examines how incentives, beliefs, and social norms shape individual choices — from everyday consumption decisions to cooperative behavior in organizations and society.
His empirical research follows a multi-method approach that combines laboratory, field, and online experiments with survey studies and econometric analysis. His work has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals including American Economic Review, Management Science, Journal of Labor Economics, European Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, and PNAS.
Sebastian J. Goerg received his doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Bonn in 2010, supervised by Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten. His research and academic contributions have been recognized with several awards, including the Heinz Sauermann Prize for the best dissertation in Experimental Economics, the TUMCS Teaching Excellence Award, and the Supervisory Award of the TUMCS Graduate Center. His academic career has taken him to institutions across three continents, including visiting positions at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2007–2008) and the University of Michigan (2011–2012), a position as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (2009–2012), and a tenure-track Assistant Professorship at Florida State University (2012–2018) before joining TUM in 2018.