IInes Lindner is Associate Professor Associate Professor of Mathematical Economics at the School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a Research Fellow of the Tinbergen Institute. She obtained her PhD in Mathematical Economics from the University of Hamburg in 2003, after graduating as Diplom-Mathematikerin from the same university in 1998. Before joining VU Amsterdam in 2007, she held positions at CORE (Université Catholique de Louvain), the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and the Utrecht School of Economics. Her research uses mathematical and network-analytic tools to address questions of democratic resilience, disinformation, and collective decision-making in digital societies. She has published in leading journals including the International Economic Review, the Journal of Development Economics, and Social Networks, and teaches in executive education through the VU Leadership Academy.
dr. Ines Lindner
Associate Professor, School of Business and Economics, Economics
, Tinbergen Institute
Ines Lindner studies how societies form opinions, reach decisions, and become vulnerable to manipulation in an age of social media, bots, and coordinated disinformation. Why do some online communities resist fake news while others collapse into echo chambers? When do crowds become "wise" rather than polarised? How can democratic institutions remain robust when the information environment is increasingly contested? Her work develops mathematical tools to answer these questions and translates the results into evidence that policy-makers, platforms, and civil-society organisations can act on.
Methodologically, the work combines spectral graph theory, Markov chain methods, and models of social learning to analyse opinion dynamics, network resilience, and collective action. Recent projects include a spectral theory of transient consensus in echo chambers under bot influence; random-walk models with traversal costs for adversarial monitoring and network optimisation; and studies of how the structure of professional and organisational networks shapes innovation, cooperation, and inequality. The work speaks directly to Horizon Europe priorities on democratic resilience, trust in public institutions, the integrity of the information ecosystem, and inclusive and sustainable digital transformation. Application domains include social media platforms, organisational and team networks, international trade and supply networks, and public-policy contexts where collective action and democratic decision-making are at stake.
Ines Lindner teaches across bachelor, research-master, and executive levels. At research-master level she contributes to the curriculum on networks and computational social science, with courses on Social Network Analysis, Games on Networks, and Social Media Data Analytics. At bachelor level she has long taught core mathematical economics, including for the Econometrics & Operations Research and Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) programmes. She also designs and delivers network-analysis modules for executives, policy professionals, and senior leaders through the VU Leadership Academy, translating frontier research on networks and disinformation into formats accessible to non-specialist audiences.
She has been active in educational innovation throughout her career. She founded and headed the SBE Innovation Center, which was nominated for the VU Innovation Prize in 2015, and won the VU Innovation Prize in 2017 for the Online Summer Prep-Campus SBE. She regularly supervises master's theses and PhD candidates working at the interface of network science, economics, and the social sciences.
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- HB Economic Theory, H Social Sciences (General), Social Networks, Economic Netwo...
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