Heidelberg University’s Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences has awarded its 2026 Dissertation Award to Dr. Vinicius Ferraz, Partner and Chief AI Officer at Singularity.Inc. The prize recognises the best economics dissertation at the faculty over the past three years.

The research combined machine learning and computer simulation with laboratory experiments to understand how people actually make economic decisions: how they learn, how they think about fairness, and how much they dislike losing. It was supervised by Prof. Christiane Schwieren.

We mention this not because awards are the point, but because the subject is. Every engagement we run ends at the same place: a human deciding whether to trust an output, change a process or sign off on a system. Those decisions are not made by rational agents. They are made by people who update their beliefs slowly, who weigh a loss far more heavily than an equivalent gain, and who will walk away from a good outcome if the process feels unfair. A firm that advises on AI transformation without a serious model of that behaviour is advising on the easy half of the problem.

Vinicius’s academic work continues inside Singularity AI Research. His recent paper with KIT Karlsruhe on the internal anatomy of strategic choice in large language models applies the same discipline in the other direction: not how people decide, but how models do, and whether their stated reasoning matches what is happening inside them. The two questions belong together. An organisation that puts AI into its decisions needs to understand both sides of the table.

Congratulations to Vinicius, and our thanks to Heidelberg for recognising work that matters well beyond the faculty.