Rosemarie Nagel

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

Social & Behavioural Sciences

Rosemarie Nagel received her PhD in economics in 1994 from the University of Bonn with Reinhard Selten as her advisor. In 1994-1995 she was post doc with Al Roth, University Pittsburgh. Since 1995 she has been working in the Department of Economics and Business in Universitat Pompeu Fabra; in 2006 she was promoted to full professor and in 2007 she joined ICREA as a research professor. Her main research is in experimental and behavioral economics, especially in macro economic experiments and in neuro economics. She has published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Financial Times, Spektrum der Wissenschaft, etc.


Research interests

I work in the area of experimental economics focusing on simplified economic situations of risk, coordination and competition. I develop descriptive models departing from game theory and decision theory, introducing knowledge from psychology and neurosciences related to theory of mind. I link behavioural data created in experiments with brain activity gained through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or eye-tracking data co-working with cognitive scientists, neuro-scientists, biologists, and psychologists. Furthermore, with other experimental economists and macro theorists I promote the interaction between the two groups with summer schools, workshops, and research using experimental tools to tackle macro questions. Finally, with colleagues from UPF we integrate economic experiments as teaching tools in undergraduate courses to better understand the mathematical models and show the relationship between students’ own behavior in economic experiments and theoretical outcomes.

Selected publications

– Balkenborg D & Nagel R 2016, ‘An Experiment on Forward vs. Backward Induction: How Fairness and Level k Reasoning Matter’, German Economic Review, 17, 3, 378 – 408.

– Brañas-Garza P, Espín AM,  Herrmann B, Kujal P & Nagel R 2016, ‘Editorial: Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior in Economic Games’, Frontier Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, 243.