Zurich, Switzerland
chief economist zalando, prof econ uni zurich, interested in e-commerce, media, antitrust, and letting data tell its story
I lead the Economics and Experimentation group at Zalando, where we support senior leaders' high-impact business decisions with the most trustworthy available scientific evidence and foster a robust data-driven decision-making culture across the company through the widespread adoption of experimentation and, where experimentation is not possible, through other empirical methods such as observational causal inference, machine learning, and structural econometric methods. Separately, I also lead Zalando's efforts to measure the relevance of our assortment at scale and use those insights across the company to make better customer, partner, and commercial decisions.
In my academic work, I am an empirical economist specializing in the fields of industrial organization, antitrust/competition policy, and media economics. My research interests include antitrust and regulation, digital platforms, vertical integration and foreclosure, bargaining, public-service broadcasting, advertising, and empirical methods for analyzing these topics. [This description also applies to my previous academic appointments below.]
I am the co-founder, with Cristina Caffarra, Head of European Operations at Keystone Strategy, and was the first director of the CEPR Research and Policy Network (RPN) on Competition Policy. Our goal was to create a leading platform for the discussion of competition policy worldwide, creating a bridge between the enforcers and policymakers facing practical policy questions and the academics with an interest in those questions.
I was the co-director, with Andrea Prat, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, of the Industrial Organization Programme at the CEPR. In this role, I led the organization of the annual conference and "school" for Applied Industrial Organization (IO), whose goal it was to be the leading academic conference in Europe for presenting theoretical and empirical research in IO, as well as providing a platform for promising young IO scholars to get exposure for their work.