Market Engineering by Gimpel, Henner

Information and Market Engineering
at KIT: Quo Vadis?
David Dann, Michael Thomas Knierim, Christian Peukert, Philipp Staudt,
and Tim Straub
Abstract Information systems (IS) are nowadays at the core of many personal and
institutional activities and influence daily life more than ever before. To understand,
evaluate and envision the forms of how we interact with IS, interdisciplinary
and multifaceted research efforts are required. At the Information and Market
Engineering chair at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, this task is taken head-on
via research that stretches from user experiences to system design. In this review, the
present research foci at the department are outlined, together with a brief description
of its origins and the global developments that underly the necessity of conducting
these particular IS studies.
1 Introduction
With the turn of the millennium, information technology (IT) had become an
omnipresent phenomenon in people’s lives and minds. The fearfully anticipated
Y2K problem vividly demonstrated how widely IT-based systems had spread and
how dependent many aspects of our lives had become on it. However, in the
following years, instead of slowing down, the speed of IT-based system diffusion
rapidly increased, weaving these systems into the fabric of our lives more than ever.
A striking example of this development is the ranking of global companies’ market
capitalization. Whereas in the beginning of the 2000s, companies like Exxon,
General Electric, Total and Citibank were in the top five of publicly traded com-

panies, they have step by step been overtaken by companies like Apple, Alphabe

Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook by the end of 2015. Similarly, firmly established
business sectors have been uprooted by the emerging digital competition, as can be
seen in the sharing economy where services like Uber and Airbnb have become
major competitors to traditional mobility and lodging offerings. Nowadays, almost
all economic decisions in business and everyday life are supported by IT-based
systems. These systems increasingly “cast in code” institutions and processes and
influence the interactions and behaviour of decision-makers. Most recently, the
importance of acknowledging the impact that these digitization processes have is
embodied in the public and scholastic recognition of how social media platforms
influence individual, social and institutional functioning. The wilful capitalization
on biological reward mechanisms to increase IT use and the staggering increase of
psychological ailments such as addictive tendencies, anxiety, stress and loneliness
driven by the ever-attention-demanding social media applications and platforms
(Kloker et al. 2020) represent issues on the individual and social level. On the
institutional level, tendencies of increased political radicalization and public opinion
manipulation (e.g. in elections) represent problematic and fundamental challenges
imposed by today’s ubiquity of IT-based systems. At the same time, IT-based
systems still offer unprecedented potential to improve societies and human lives
through democratic empowerment (e.g. through digital participation in govern-

mental decision-making), ecological sustainability (e.g. through information and
market access related to the ongoing energy transition) or data-driven economic
and technological innovation (e.g. through the identification of insights in big data).
In this dynamic world, the interplay between economic decision-making and
system design has become a core of IS research in general and research at
the Information and Market Engineering (IM) chair at the Karlsruhe Institute
of Technology (KIT) in particular. Over the years, research at the IM chair has
covered a variety of topics that tackle the aforementioned individual, social and
institutional challenges of IT-based systems. This chapter focuses on the most recent
developments and research directions at the IM chair. In particular, this chapter aims
to present a focused view on the present work in the sectors of energy markets,
data analytics, user behaviour, digital experience and digital participation. This
represents the work of research departments that are formed within the IM chair
today. To provide an introduction on how these departments emerged, the following
section provides a brief overview of the research topic developments in the form of
IM dissertation-based text analysis. Afterwards, in the third section, an overview of
the current department’s work is given, including pressing global IT-based system
developments and derived fields of research.

Market Engineering by Gimpel, Henner