On November 14, 2023, the ceremony for the A.SK Social Science Award took place at the WZB. Endowed with 100,000 euros, it is one of the world’s largest in the social sciences. In addition, two Bright Mind Awards were presented to younger social scientists with a prize sum of 20,000 euros each. All three awards honor research on public policy with a focus on economic and governmental reforms. The 2023 award recipient is Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the award for his vastly influential work on, among others, the decisive role of institutions in capitalist economies, on the forces of state and society, and on the uses and risks of automation.

The two A.SK Bright Mind Awards were awarded to Filiz Garip, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, for reshaping our narratives of migration and Stefanie Stantcheva, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, for her work on how people understand, reason, and learn about tax policies.

Former recipients are the economist Sir Anthony Atkinson (2007/University of Oxford), the legal scholar and philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (2009/University of Chicago), Transparency International (2011/Berlin), the economist Paul Collier (2013/University of Oxford), the developmental economist Esther Duflo (2015/MIT), who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, the political scientist John Ruggie (2017/Harvard) and Harvard economist Raj Chetty (2019). In 2021, the A.SK Social Science Award was presented to James C. Scott  (Yale) for his life-long research on agrarian societies.

The prize recipients are selected by an international commission chaired by Dorothea Kübler, director of the WZB department Market Behavior.