Sebastian Schneider

Sebastian Schneider is a Max Planck Research Group Leader (non-tenured) at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, where he heads the independent research group on Behavioral Economics. He combines experimental methods with data science to study decision-making, risk preferences, and behavioral interventions in diverse contexts.

• PhD in Economics from Georg-August-University Goettingen (2017)
• MSc and BSc in Mathematics in Business and Economics from University of Mannheim (2014 and 2011)

Research Interests: Behavioral economics, experimental economics, household finance, health economics, development economics, and environmental economics. He develops causal frameworks for behavioral research and created the MinMSE method for treatment assignment, available as Stata and R packages.

Publication Trends: Recent work focuses on default options and information avoidance, status quo bias in decision-making, and behavioral responses to health and development interventions, including a phone-based information campaign during the pandemic in Bangladesh. His experimental contributions span risk preferences, saving behavior, and incentive structures.

Software Development: Created widely used tools for treatment assignment:

• Stata minmse package
• R minMSE package