Welcome!

I am a Max Planck Research Group Leader (non-tenured) of the independent research group “Behavioral Economics and Data Science” at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics. The research focus of my group is (the combination of) behavioral and experimental economics, behavioral finance, and data science for (causal) behavioral research.

Most of my work has considered decision making, in particular decision under risk and uncertainty.

I am an Associate Editor (Health Section) of the newly founded journal Frontiers in Behavioral Economics.

Education

PhD in Economics, 2017

University of Goettingen
MSc in Mathematics in Business and Economics, 2014

University of Mannheim
BSc in Mathematics in Business and Economics, 2011

University of Mannheim

Publications in Peer-Reviewed Journals

Sebastian O. Schneider, Matthias Sutter (2026). Risk Preferences and Field Behavior: The Relevance of Higher-Order Risk Preferences. American Economic Review 116 (1): 88–118.

PDF DOI: 10.1257/aer.20211217 Online Appendix (Supplemental Appendix) Supplementary Material (2025)

Mustafa Kaba, Murat Koyuncu, Sebastian O. Schneider, Matthias Sutter (2024). Social Norms, Political Polarization, and Vaccination Attitudes: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey. European Economic Review 168: 104818.

PDF DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104818

Kai Barron, Heike Harmgart, Steffen Huck, Sebastian O. Schneider, Matthias Sutter (2023). Discrimination, narratives and family history: An experiment with Jordanian host and Syrian refugee children. Review of Economics and Statistics 105 (4): 1008–1016.

PDF DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01090

Revise and Resubmits

Matthias Sutter, Michael Weyland, Anna Untertrifaller, Manuel Froitzheim, Sebastian O. Schneider (2023). Financial literacy, experimental preference measures and field behavior – A randomized educational intervention. Discussion Papers of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 2023/3. Revision requested by the Journal of Political Economy.

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Shyamal Chowdhury, Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch, Sebastian O. Schneider, Matthias Sutter (2022). Information provision over the phone saves lives. Discussion Papers of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 2022/9. Reject and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics.

PDF Media Coverage in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German) Media Coverage in BR alpha Campus Talks (TED-talk style, German)

Working Paper

Sebastian O. Schneider, Marcela Ibanez, Gerhard Riener (2024). Measuring Utility – An Application to Higher Order Risk.

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Marcela Ibanez, Sebastian O. Schneider (2024). Income Risk, Precautionary Saving, and Loss Aversion – An Empirical Test.

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Gerhard Riener, Sebastian O. Schneider, Valentin Wagner (2024). Addressing Validity and Generalizability Concerns in Field Experiments. Discussion Papers of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 2020/16.

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Zvonimir Bašić, Stefania Bortolotti, Daniel Salicath, Stefan Schmidt, Sebastian O. Schneider, Matthias Sutter (2024). One size fits all? The interplay of incentives, effort provision, and personality. Discussion Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 2024/13.

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Katharina Momsen, Sebastian O. Schneider (2024). How do defaults affect information acquisition and processing?.

PDF Media Coverage in Harvard Business Manager (German)

Sebastian O. Schneider, Martin Schlather (2021). Rerandomization to Improve Covariate Balance by Minimizing the MSE of a Treatment Effect Estimator. Older version (A New Approach to Treatment Assignment for One and Multiple Treatment Groups), was published in 2017 as: Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers 228, http://hdl.handle.net/10419/161931.

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