Mads Höfer

Biography

Mads is working towards a DPhil in Geography and the Environment and is affiliated with the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment under the supervision of Dr Stefania Innocenti. He has previously completed a master’s degree in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, focusing on the effect of recommendations on decision-making within e-commerce environments. Continuing his previous strand of work, Mads is looking at the effect that social norms have on actual behaviour. Specifically, he is looking at the intention-behaviour gap regarding sustainable consumption choices. He is adopting a complex adaptive systems approach to his studies and thus considers how consumers’ environments affect the perceptions of pro-environmental behaviours (e.g., lowering room temperature). This includes the effects of social norms, social identities, physical affordances, perceived costs, among others. For his studies, Mads utilises behavioural data scientific methods, including graph theory and NLP. Additionally, Mads is leading a research project on eliciting deep individual-level preferences for fairness and equity and how such predispositions affect support for Pigouvian Taxation attempting to correct for unequal intra- and inter-generational resource allocation. The predominant methodology deployed for this project is economic modelling and large-scale online experiments.