Lectures

CISS POSTPONED (2021)

Due to ongoing distance rules and travel restrictions, the CISS Summer School will not take place in 2020.

In urgent cases, you can contact the managing director of CISS, Dr. Susanne Thorwarth, via E-Mail

CISS offers young interested researchers within the fields of innovation and competition economics the possibility to intensively discuss their dissertation plan within a peer group of experienced and renowned scholars, other PhD students and post-doc researchers. Topics of the school are clustered around the key subjects "innovation" and "competition" as well as their interaction.

The schedule of CISS offers three types of sessions:

Formal lectures in the morning giving a broad overview on specific research topics and current research in the particular fields.
Workshops on research tools which will provide students with more hands-on methodologies, such as econometric applications (e.g. panel data, count data models, competition policy in two-sided markets, etc.).
Student workshops offer young researchers the opportunity to discuss their PhD work together with juniors from the same field and faculty members. Participants will be assigned in different groups chaired by faculty discussants. The more informal character of these sessions (round table style) fosters interesting and lively discussions among participants.

Below you will find more detailed information on lectures/workshops which will be taught at CISS 2020 (to be completed).

The SearchEngine - A Tool for Matching by Fuzzy Criteria (Thorsten Doherr)

Being able to match large databases from different sources becomes more and more a required skill for empirical researchers as the low hanging fruits, meaning topics based on data from a single source, are often already harvested. Luckily, the additional effort not only opens opportunities for new but also deeper research. The main issue is the fact, that most data collectors have other things in mind than providing common keys for researchers. For example, a patent office does not collect VAT numbers for the applicants as these are not required for the legal status of the documents. Local administrations have to publish all EU funded projects on their webpages but do not provide links to firm level databases. Without a shared key, the match has to be based on mutual content, which usually is not harmonized. Whoever has tried to match by harmonization of firm address fields knows that this is a frustrating and time consuming procedure, especially for international data. This seminar empowers the participants to use a universal and free matching tool called SearchEngine. As the specific properties of every match are different and the quality of the result fundamentally depends on the customization of the SearchEngine, it also teaches the basics of the implemented heuristics from the weighted Jaccard metric to the clustering of self-referential matches to identify duplicates.