Jens Prüfer is Director of the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC), Professor of Economics at the University of East Anglia’s School of Economics, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Competition Policy (CCP). His research focuses on institutional and organizational questions, applying economic methodology to a broad set of disciplines, including law, management, political science, history, religious studies, and computer science. He studied Economics and Chinese studies in Tübingen (Germany) and Singapore and holds a PhD in Economics from Goethe University Frankfurt. Jens Prüfer is a member of the expert group to the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy. He is the editor of sioe.org, the website of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, where he also regularly blogs, and a Mercator Fellow at the University of Passau (“Digital Platform Ecosystems”). He is the Principal Investigator of EU Horizon project “Using Artificial Intelligence to Support Regulators and Policy Makers” (AI4POL; 2025-27), where he particularly studies “AI in Autocratic Countries.” Currently, he serves as Co-editor of a special issue on “European Integration, Institutions, and Development” at the Journal of Comparative Economics.
Research fields:
- Institutional Economics, in particular the study of economic governance institutions, which help to support cooperation/honest trade with and without the law (public and private ordering).
- Organizational Economics, in particular the economics of non-firm organizations such as nonprofits, cooperatives, social networks, clubs, associations or foundations. Why do these organizations exist and (how) do they behave differently in competitive markets?
- Law & Economics, in particular antitrust policy and ‘order without law’.
- Industrial Organization, in particular competition policy and regulation and the dependence of those issues on the governance structure of competitors.
- Political Economics, in particular the role of the media for political outcomes.
- Economics of Digital Transformation: the effects of digitization, datafication, and AI on markets, polities, societies, and jurisdictions.
