Hi. I am Tobias Felix Werner.

In September 2025, I will start as an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Economics at the University of Southampton. My research combines industrial organization, the economics of artificial intelligence, and experimental methods.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development, where I now continue as an Associated Research Scientist. I am also affiliated with the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), where I earned my PhD in 2023. In Spring 2025, I visited the group of David C. Parkes at Harvard University.

You can find my research below and my CV here.

Job market paper
Algorithmic and Human Collusion, Revise and Resubmit at The Economic Journal

Abstract: I study self-learning pricing algorithms and show that they are collusive in market simulations. To derive a counterfactual that resembles traditional tacit collusion, I conduct market experiments with humans in the same environment. Across different treatments, I vary the market size and the number of firms that use a pricing algorithm. I demonstrate that oligopoly markets can become more collusive if algorithms make pricing decisions instead of humans. In two-firm markets, prices are weakly increasing in the number of algorithms in the market. In three-firm markets, algorithms weaken competition if most firms use an algorithm and human sellers are inexperienced.

[PDF] [Video]

Publications

• Algorithmic Price Recommendations and Collusion: Experimental Evidence (with Matthias Hunold), Experimental Economics, 2025, accepted

• Willingness to volunteer among remote workers is insensitive to the team size (with Adrian Hillenbrand and Fabian Winter), Experimental Economics, 2025, accepted

• A new sociology of humans and machines (with Milena Tsvetkova, Taha Yasseri, and Niccolo Pescetelli), Nature Human Behaviour  8, 1864–1876 (2024)

• What drives demand for loot boxes? An experimental study (with Simon Cordes and Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt) Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 228 (2024): 106755

Working Paper & Work in Progress

• Algorithmic Cooperation  (with Bernhard Kasberger, Simon Martin and Hans-Theo Normann), Revise and resubmit at Games and Economic Behavior

• Experimental Evidence That Conversational Artificial Intelligence Can Steer Consumer Behavior Without Detection (with Ivan Soraperra, Emilio Calvano, David C. Parkes and Iyad Rahwan)

• Human-Machine Interactions in Pricing: Evidence from Two Large-Scale Field Experiments (with Tobias Huelden, Vitalijs Jascisens, and Lars Roemheld)

• The Spoils of Algorithmic Collusion: Profit Allocation Among Asymmetric Firms (with Simon Martin, Hans-Theo Normann, and Paul Püplichhuisen)

• Recognising, Anticipating, and Mitigating LLM Pollution of Online Behavioural Research (with Raluca Rilla, Hiromu Yakura, Iyad Rahwan, and Anne-Marie Nussberger)

• Delegate Pricing Decisions to an Algorithm? Experimental Evidence (with Hans-Theo Normann, Nina Rulié, and Olaf Stypa)

• Designing Deceptive Features for Lottery Sales: Experimental Evidence (with Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt, Hans-Theo Normann, and Jan-Niklas Tiede)