The Hertie School and six research institutions have joined forces to form the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies.
Promoting consumers’ rights, prosperity, and wellbeing are core values of the European Union. A wide array of laws, institutions, and regulations – which can be generally termed as consumer policies – aim at protecting consumers by ensuring adequate and truthful information in the marketplace as well as preventing firms from engaging in unfair and competition-impairing practices.
While some of these policies directly affect consumers, for instance consumer protection and dissuasive taxation, others only indirectly benefit consumers by governing market functions through regulation and competition policies. The interactions between these different policies are not yet fully understood.
The aim of the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) is to create an enduring international platform in the broad area of competition and consumer policies, where excellent interdisciplinary research can actively and effectively inform policy makers on issues that are highly relevant to the current policy debate.
The Centre can build on the existing, strong, visible, and interdisciplinary cooperation among the two Leibniz institutes DIW Berlin and WZB, several faculties of the three universities Humboldt University Berlin, Free University Berlin, and Technical University Berlin, the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), and the Hertie School.
Christian Traxler, Professor of Economics at Hertie School, will support the BCCP as a Senior Fellow.
Please find more information on the BCCP's webpage.