First, he presented at the seventh “Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop” (WOW7), organized at Indiana University Bloomington. This conference, which occurs only every five years, focuses on current research in governance as initiated by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, the latter was the Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Sciences in 2009. At WOW7, Benedikt Schmal presented his ongoing work titled “On Cartels as Common Pool Resources,” applying Ostromian governance theory to gain insights into the inner workings of corporate cartels. Due to the academic quality of his work, he was invited to stay directly on campus at Indiana University and received a fee waiver for the conference.
Secondly, he presented his project titled “Polycentric Governance of Collusive Agreements” at the Annual Conference of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE) at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Subsequently, the paper was accepted for publication in the influential Journal of Institutional Economics, published by Cambridge University Press.
The conference trip was financially supported by the “Marburger Gesellschaft für Ordnungsfragen der Wirtschaft,” and their funding is gratefully acknowledged.