Chair of
Environment and Economics

Environmental issues such as climate change and resource scarcity are gaining increasing importance in society, political decisions and for business. A forward-looking understanding of future requirements for a sustainable economy offers opportunities for innovation and the ability of market leadership in the environmental sector.

The ESCP Chair of Environment and Economics - founded in the summer of 2011 - picks up these topics in innovative ways. Current environmental problems are discussed jointly with their economic analysis and behavioural foundations of economic decisions.

In research, the chair focusses on Agent-Based-Modelling and Behavioural Economic approaches in Ecological Economics. Simulation models are used to understand why decisions often lead to an unsustainable behaviour and to analyse how politics could change that. A further area of interest is the Circular Economy.

The chair holder Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf is Scientific Director of the Research Center SustBusy: Business and Society - Towards a Sustainable World and European Academic Director of the Master in International Sustainability Management.

- Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf

The team

Teaching
Research
Publications
Team & Contact

Teaching
We offer the following courses:

Bachelor in
Management(BSc)

Introduction to Behavioural Economics
Prof. Dr. Robert Wilken / Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf

Go to the programme

MSc in
International Sustainability Management

Environmental and Resource Economics
Elective: Urban Resilience
Project workshop in cooperation with Prof. Jochen Rabe, TU Berlin

Go to the programme

Master in
Management

German Track Major in Environmental Management and Sustainability

(The first 3 courses are taught in German)

Environmental management I: Management systems, reporting and “green” solutions
Prof. Dr. Jan-Uwe Lieback / Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf
Environmental management II: Resource scarcity, economic analysis and business effects
Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf
European Environmental Law
Corporate Social Responsibility: How to Manage Social issues in a Global World
Prof. Dr. Rolf Brühl

Business Game simulation

Go to the programme

MSc in
Sustainability Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Ecological foundations of business

Go to the programme

PhD
Programme

Agent-Based Modeling with NETLOGO and Mathematica

Research

Research approach

Agent-Based-Modelling on the basis of Behavioural and Evolutionary Economics with application in Ecological Economics

Topics

Climate-economic models on a behavioural basis
Behavioural aspects of environmental problems
Resource scarcity
Sustainable development
Circular economy

Methods

Agent-based modelling
Evolutionary economics
Behavioural economics
Complexity theory
Genetic algorithms

Research topics

Climate-Economic Multi-Agent Modelling

Several papers on an update and further development of a multi-agent model on climate change, the “battle of perspectives” investigate the effect of bounded rationality and learning on climate policy.

Multi-Agent Analysis of Sustainability Policy

A recent project models the link between an evolving, innovating economy, based on a Nelson-Winter approach with a renewable natural resource. Both systems are modelled considering more complexity than traditional environmental or resource economic models do. The model is used to analyse if and how a sustainable path can be reached in this coupled system.

Circular Economy

The 3 year EU funded Horizon 2020 project “R2 π: Transition from Linear to Circular: Policy and Innovation” conducts case studies and develops teaching material on the Circular Economy. A recent publication, “The circular economy and circular economic concepts–a literature analysis and redefinition”, provides key insights on the circular economy and redefines the concept in light of the other similar concepts such as cradle-to-cradle or the blue economy.

Current project applications

Horizon 2020 call: H2020-SwafS-2016-17 (Science with and for Society) “iOPENER”
Horizon 2020 call: H2020-MG-2016-2017, RIA, MG-7-2-2017 „Pipe§Net“

Research center

SUST BUSY: Business and Society - Towards a Sustainable World

Scientific Director: Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf, ESCP Berlin

The research center “Business and Society – Towards a Sustainable World” (SustBusy), whose office is located at the Department of Environment and Economics in Berlin provides a common roof for these related activities. The individual and group-related research projects cover a wide area of research issues. Company-specific issues, development of a sustainability culture, implementation of a sustainability strategy or sustainable supply chains are covered as well as CSR reporting, socially responsible investment, social issues of an anti-consumption lifestyle and a behavioural economics based analysis of environmental policy. The special feature of the research center is the broadly-based position of its members and its high potential for synergies. There are two main links between our approaches where individual projects might benefit from each other. First there are several projects on the company and reporting level which could exchange information on a sustainability culture or strategy as well as CSR reporting. Second, the projects on company, consumer and financial market level would benefit from a link to the political/regulation side as well as this research could profit from empirical results on the behaviour of the respective agents.

Focus on:
Last Publications

Articles in magazines

Geisendorf, Sylvie (2017): Evolutionary Climate-Change Modelling: A Multi-Agent Climate-Economic Model. Computational Economics, DOI 10.1007/s10666-017-9549-3

Essays in anthologies

Geisendorf, Sylvie (2009): The irrational foundations of neoclassical economics - How economists tried to become „scientific“ with simplified Newtonism. In: Ötsch, Walter O. und Thomasberger, Claus (Hg.) Der neoliberale Markt-Diskurs Ursprünge, Geschichte, Wirkungen. Metropolis, Marburg

Monographs

Hey, Christian, Hickmann, Gerd, Geisendorf, Sylvie, Schleicher Tappeser, Ruggero (1992) Dead End Road. Climate change in European freight transport, Freiburg

Reviewed Conference Papers

Ecological instability and economic evolution – Integrated biological evolutionary modelling, Annual meeting of the Society for Evolutionary Economics, Hannover, 30th June – 2nd July 2016

Working Papers

Geisendorf, Sylvie (2009): Do we believe in climate change? A multi-agent climate-economic model. papers on agent-based economics: 08 (2009). Section environmental and innovation economics, University of Kassel

See all publications

Publications
Find an overview

Searching NK fitness landscapes : On the trade off between speed and quality in complex problem solving

COMPUTATIONAL ECONOMICS, Vol. 35, Issue 4, 395-406 12 p.

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Team and contact

Prof. Dr. Sylvie Geisendorf

Chair Owner & European Academic Director
Master in International Sustainability Management

+49 30 32007 183

sgeisendorf@escpeurope.eu

Paul Wolf

Research assistant / PhD student

+49 30 32007 221

pwolf@escpeurope.eu

Daniel Jonhson, Research Assistant, Berlin Campus, ESCP

Daniel Johnson

Research assistant / PhD student

+49 30 32007 165

djohnson@escpeurope.eu

Andreas Aigner

Research assistant / PhD student

+49 30 32007 162

aaigner@escpeurope.eu

Christian Klipper

External PhD student