The common theme uniting my research is the analysis of collective decision making and its role for democratic societies. This combines aspects from philosophy, political science and economics alike, reflecting my interdisciplinary academic background..
Methodologically, I like to use formal and computational modeling techniques, (agent-based modeling, game theory) as well as classic philo-sophical analyses, where I am concerned with descriptive and normative questions alike. I am also interested in experimental approaches and big data methods.
Rationality, Bargaining and Inequality
The emergence of economic inequality has often been linked to varying individual capacities. However, simula-tions of an agent-based model of bar-gaining suggest that neither of these is a necessary condition. Rather, inequality can arise from iterated interactions of fully rational agents. By enquiring into inequality's potential causes, this project discovers important implications for how rationality should be conceptualized.
RESEARCH
Simon Scheller
Political Epistemology
Democracy's epistemic virtue and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ constitute central themes in democratic theory. However, recent political developments challenge the widely accepted proposition that democratic institutions facilitate episte-mically superior collective decisions. This mismatch alludes to ‘Democracy's episte-mic crisis’ and invites the question: (How) can epistemic theories of democracy stand up to these novel challenges?
Trust and Diversity
Trust constitutes an important driving force of social interaction. With in-creasing societal heterogeneity (e.g. through refugee flows or labour mi-gration), the role of trust relations be-tween groups deserves special atten-tion. The goal of this project is to de-velop a dynamic model to explain the emergence and persistence of social trust within and between groups (for example between native and refugee populations).
© Simon Scheller 2018