Research focus areas

The research group on Foundations of Law, Private Law, and the Economic Analysis of Law (chair: Prof. Dr. Georg von Wangenheim) studies various fields in Law and Economics:

Very fundamental research concerns the evolution of legal and social norms based on the interdependence of behavior and norms. All research in this field is based on the assumption that individual intrests at least influence both behavior and norms as well as the latter's adoption.

Far more applied is our research on legal and social norms that affect the environment and climate change. Our focus is on two major applications: One is how heating of buildings and its environmental impact depends on legal rules either from regulatory law or from tenancy law. The other focus are means to align demand for private electricity consumption with supply fluctuations bymeans of dynamic tariffs or technical demand regulation by suppliers or networks.

Our most innovation-related research topic is the law and economics of distributed ledger technology. We concentrate on applications of the blockchain technology outside the financial sector. Here, our research is embedded in the blochcain-center.eu.