I am a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Experimental Economics, Finance, and Metascience at the Department of Banking and Finance, University of Innsbruck. I also serve as Scientific Coordinator of Lab Operations at the Innsbruck EconLab.

My research examines judgment and decision-making under risk and uncertainty, sustainable and socially responsible choices, and the production of credible evidence through large-scale crowd science and metascience. I combine laboratory, online, field, and cross-country experiments with rigorous empirical analysis.

Research Program

My work spans three connected research areas:

• Judgment and Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty: Studying framing, investment behavior, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying financial decisions.
• Sustainable and Socially Responsible Choices: Examining environmental policy support, collective action, green investment, and pro-environmental behavior.
• Crowd Science and Metascience: Coordinating many-designs, many-analyst, multi-lab, and cross-country studies to improve the robustness, transparency, and cumulative value of scientific evidence.

Current Research

My recent work includes Fifty-five Crowd-Sourced Designs Assessing Carbon Pricing Support, accepted for publication at Nature Human Behaviour. I am joint first author and a member of the five-person core organizing team for this project, which evaluated 55 experimental designs with 19,558 participants. Other recent publications appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Management Science.

Current manuscripts examine visible tax dividends, decision flexibility and myopic loss aversion, cognitive fatigue in laboratory research, and virtual nature in open-world games. Full details are available on the publications, working papers, and talks pages.

Research Visits and Collaboration

Confirmed research visits for 2026 and 2027 include Chulalongkorn Business School, HKUST Business School, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Stanford University, and Columbia Business School. I welcome international collaboration on experimental research, large-scale team science, and open-science projects.

Teaching and Mentoring

I teach and supervise across undergraduate, graduate, MBA, and professional programs in finance, economics, sustainability, and ethical decision-making. My teaching portfolio includes 32 official reports and 332 student questionnaires. Across the 27 reports containing global scores, average ratings are 1.29 for content and 1.38 for delivery on a five-point scale where 1 is the best score. More information is available on the teaching page.

Academic Engagement

I contribute to the FAIRInv consortium on responsible investment, funded by the French National Research Agency with EUR 4.0 million for 2026-2030, and served as a contributing author to the Austrian Assessment Report on Climate Change 2. My academic service includes the University of Innsbruck Curriculum Committee, departmental research meetings, student mentoring, and conference organization. I received the 2023 Clemens August Andreae Prize for the best dissertation in economics at the University of Innsbruck.

Get in Touch

I welcome opportunities for research collaboration and academic exchange. Please contact me at rene.schwaiger@uibk.ac.at or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Stay Connected

You can also find my work and open-science projects on Google Scholar, OSF, ORCID, and ResearchGate.