Dr. Leon Houf
Post-Doctoral researcher in Behavioural Economics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Manager of the KD²Lab.
Post-Doctoral researcher in Behavioural Economics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Manager of the KD²Lab.
I'm a behavioural economist working on human decision-making in organisations, with a background in economics and ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations across information systems, computer science, and anthropology. I am an Associate at the DFG-funded KD²School on Designing Biosignal-Adaptive Systems for Decision-Making. Previously, I worked at the economics faculty of Heidelberg University, associated with the field of focus on Self-Regulation and Regulation: Individuals and Societies.
I use experiments and computational methods to study human behaviour, currently in its interaction with AI. I also study the experimental method itself, how it produces knowledge and under what conditions it holds up. My research has two foci:
How do organisations create hidden costs at the intersection of human behaviour and technology?
Escalation of commitment is one of the most persistent findings in behavioural science: people keep pouring resources into failing projects long past the point they should walk away. What happens to that dynamic when an AI agent is part of the decision? That's the main project I'm working on now. It sits inside a broader question: how organisations and people, through design and the technology, produce costly decisions. Related projects look at chatbots and risk-taking, and at how talking about AI changes who gets picked as a leader.
How does experimental economics produce knowledge, and under what conditions does that knowledge hold up and travel?
Running the KD²Lab at KIT is where a lot of methodological thinking happens in practice: how experiments get built, how subjects get recruited, which software choices indirectly shape which findings are possible. On the more visible side, I'm involved in several large-scale replication and meta-scientific projects working out which results in behavioural economics actually hold up. A few years ago, an interdisciplinary collaboration took me to rural Laos to run a behavioural experiment with an anthropologist.