Tobias Werner awarded with a Fellowship of the Joachim Herz Stiftung
Fellowship supports research on economic topics with high social relevance

Tobias Werner, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humans and Machines, has been awarded the "Add-on Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Economics and Interdisciplinary Business Administration" by the Joachim Herz Foundation.
Tobias Werner will use the funding to investigate how companies can use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to influence consumers' purchasing decisions and how regulators can counteract this.
Especially in online retail, large e-commerce companies are increasingly using LLMs to inform consumers but also to subtly influence their purchasing decisions. At the same time, these language models are increasingly replacing traditional search engines like Google, for example. Here, too, users can be steered within a conversation with a language model to certain topics or products for which advertisers have paid. This new form of influence is more subtle than previously known methods and poses a challenge for consumer protection.
With its "Add-on Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Economics and Interdisciplinary Business Administration", the Joachim Herz Foundation supports young academics who are working on economic topics with high social relevance. Over a period of two years, the fellows are supported with an amount of up to 12,500 Euro.
For more information, see the program website of the Joachim Herz Foundation.