Giuseppe Ferro joined the High Meadows Environmental Institute in October 2022.  Before that, he worked at ETH Zürich where he received a Ph.D. in Economics.  He analyzed how real human beings make decisions under uncertainty, as opposed to what they should do.  Specifically, he focused on developing operational models of individual decision-making in risky and ambiguous setups, representing the decision activity as a stochastic process, and working at different levels of abstraction (axiomatic models, low-dimensional stochastic processes, and computational models).

He is now interested in incorporating behavioral economics into climate models, adopting a complex systems approach.  One of his projects aims to understand how recommendation algorithms on social media affect opinion dynamics on controversial issues such as climate change, analyzing the unintended consequences of an unregulated “attention” market.  Another project involves studying how intra-firm multi-authority structures impact the pursuit of multiple conflicting goals (e.g., being profitable while being environmentally responsible).