John Körtner

About

I am a PhD student at the University of Lausanne. In October, I will join the Collegio Carlo Alberto as a postdoc. I study welfare institutions, with a focus on how discretion, information, and incentives interact in the distribution of benefits and services.

My research has been supported by a Postdoc.Mobility fellowship, a Mobi.Doc grant, and by the Horowitz Foundation.

Research

Bureaucrats' Beliefs and Disparities in Service Provision,
presented at PolMeth Europe 2025 and EPSA 2025

Algorithms and Effort Adjustment: A Field Experiment with Caseworkers (with Patrick Arni), presented at SIOE 2024 and IZA/KOF 2025

Inequality-Averse Outcome-Based Matching (with Ruben Bach), presented at EPSA 2023, poster at PolMeth 2024

Electoral Predictors of Polling Errors (with Sina Chen, Jens Wiederspohn, and Peter Selb), Journal of Politics, accepted.

Bias and Variance in Multiparty Election Polls (with Peter Selb, Sina Chen, and Philipp Bosch), Public Opinion Quarterly, 87(4), 1025-1037, 2023.

Did “Trumpists” Perform Worse in US Senate Election Polls? (with Sina Chen), Significance, 19(3), 28-31, 2022.

Book Chapters, Policy Reports

Évaluation du Programme FORJAD (with Giuliano Bonoli, Rafael Lalive, and Jeremy Zuchuat), in progress

Évaluation de l’Impact des Unités communes ORP - CSR dans le Canton de Vaud (with Giuliano Bonoli and Rafael Lalive), 2024.

Predictive Algorithms in the Delivery of Public Employment Services (with Giuliano Bonoli), in Handbook of Labour Market Policy in Advanced Democracies, D. Clegg and N. Durazzi (eds.), EEP, 2023.

Teaching

Algorithmic Fairness
21/22, 22/23, 23/24, PMP, IDHEAP, University of Lausanne

Strategic Interaction and Game Theory
25/26, TSPS, Collegio Carlo Alberto