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Their core work

IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) is a Bonn-based research institute that studies how people actually make economic decisions — as opposed to how rational-actor models say they should. Their researchers run controlled experiments and build formal theory to explain systematic biases: why people procrastinate, mislearn from experience, hold overconfident beliefs, or ignore relevant information. In H2020, their ERC-funded work pushed deeper into the cognitive foundations of these biases, treating memory not as a neutral storage system but as an active mechanism that shapes economic expectations and choices. They sit at the intersection of economics, psychology, and cognitive science, producing findings that inform regulation, consumer protection, and organizational design.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their early H2020 work (2018 onward) was a wide-ranging theoretical programme cataloguing the zoo of cognitive biases — mental accounting, rational inattention, overconfidence, misguided learning, procrastination, and even adversarial contexts like malicious organisations manipulating consumer choice. The more recent project (MEMEB, 2020) is notably more focused: it zooms in on memory as the single unifying mechanism that explains why beliefs and expectations go wrong. This is a shift from describing what people do incorrectly to explaining why, at a cognitive-mechanism level.

IZA is moving from cataloguing behavioural anomalies toward mechanistic explanation — researchers considering collaboration should expect work that bridges cognitive science and economic modelling, with growing relevance to AI systems that learn from human feedback and to policy design for information environments.

How they like to work

IZA operates exclusively as a coordinator in H2020, which reflects the nature of ERC grants — these are investigator-driven awards designed for individual research excellence rather than multi-partner consortia. With only one unique consortium partner across two projects, their collaboration footprint is minimal by design, not by isolation. Anyone approaching IZA for a partnership should expect to engage directly with a lead researcher rather than a project management office, and should bring complementary empirical or theoretical capabilities rather than expecting IZA to absorb execution tasks.

IZA's H2020 network is deliberately small — one partner, one country — consistent with ERC grant structure where the award follows the principal investigator. This is not a hub organisation for multi-country consortia; their collaborative value is intellectual rather than relational.

What sets them apart

IZA is one of the world's most cited labour and behavioural economics institutes, and its H2020 ERC portfolio reflects individual researchers working at the frontier of theory and experiment — not applied technology development. What sets them apart is the combination of rigorous formal modelling and experimental testing, applied to questions that have direct policy relevance: how regulators should design disclosures, how firms can nudge better decisions, how digital platforms exploit cognitive limitations. For a consortium that needs a credible academic anchor in behavioural economics or needs to justify the human-behaviour component of a proposal, IZA carries significant reputational weight.

Highlights from their portfolio

• MEMEB
  Funded at EUR 1.28M via ERC Advanced Grant (the most competitive ERC instrument, awarded to established research leaders), this project targets the cognitive mechanism of memory as the root cause of systematic errors in economic belief formation — a rare theoretical ambition with broad downstream relevance to AI, policy, and consumer behaviour.
• Topics in Behavioral
  An ERC Starting Grant covering an unusually broad theoretical agenda — from procrastination and self-esteem to privacy, consent, and malicious organisations — signalling a research group willing to apply behavioural economics to adversarial and regulatory contexts, not just consumer choice.