Urs Fischbacher - Biography#

Urs Fischbacher, born 1959 in Zurich, studied mathematics at the University of Zurich. In 1985, he graduated with a thesis in the field of representation theory of algebras. Then, he worked as a software developer; first in industry, then at the Swiss Federal Institute WSL. In 1995, he moved to the chair of Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich. There, he wrote the software z-Tree that allows developing economic experiments quickly and with little knowledge in programming. In addition, he did research in experimental and behavioral economics, in particular in the domain of social preferences. In 2006, he got the habilitation in economics at the University of Zurich with thesis „Human Motivation and Cooperation“. Since 2007, he is professor for Applied Research in Economics at the University of Konstanz and head of the Thurgau Institute of Economics in Kreuzlingen (Switzerland). His research is focused on the investigation of non-selfish preferences, both experimentally and theoretically. For example, he provided important experimental findings on punishment behavior, in particular on the role of intentions and responsibility, and he developed an experiment to investigate honesty that is now widely used.