Research project

Berlin Center for Consumer Policies (BCCP)

The Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) aims to create an enduring international platform for the broad area of consumer policies, where excellent interdisciplinary research can actively and effectively inform policymakers on issues that are highly relevant to the current policy debate.

More about the project

28.02.2018 Press release: Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies to be expanded

Promoting consumers’ rights, prosperity, and well-being 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 that exploit consumers. 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 different policies, which are designed and implemented by various enforcement bodies, are subject to the scrutiny of diverse stakeholders, are shaped by a plurality of interdisciplinary scientific approaches (which pursue partially overlapping goals) are not yet fully understood.

The strong tradition of research in industrial organisation – coupled with a recent emphasis on behavioural economics, law, economics and a strong policy focus – makes Berlin the perfect location for a ScienceCampus focused on consumer policies. 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-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin, the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), and the Hertie School. The main goal of the BCCP is to fully exploit, reinforce, and institutionalise this exceptional environment to answer specific questions on the optimal design of consumer policies, the complementarity between the different policy areas, the evaluation of the policies' effectiveness, and the role that consumer preferences, limited rationality, as well as information asymmetries play in this process.

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Cooperating institutions

DIW - German Institute for Economic Research
WZB - Berlin Social Science Center
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Technische Universität Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin
European School of Management and Technology (ESMT)
Hertie School

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Funder

Duration

2015 – 2018

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Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies website

Hertie School project lead

Hertie School faculty and researchers

  • Kai Wegrich, Professor of Public Administration and Public Policy