Every research program worth doing has a horizon it works toward, and a daily way of moving across the ground between. The vision names the horizon, in the language of a state of the world the work is built toward. Decades away. The mission names the daily way, in the language of what the studio produces and publishes today. The two are not interchangeable, and the studio holds both. Specific enough to navigate by. Large enough to be worth the journey.
Every action in the universe begins with a decision. Including the action that created the universe itself, a cascade still unfolding around us, governed by the same logic every smaller cascade obeys. The vision below is to recognise that logic as the foundational structure of reality, applied across every substrate where reality unfolds. And the mission, in the section that follows, is what the studio does today to make that vision defensible tomorrow.
Horizon · multi-decade
The bold claim that distinguishes this work from incremental decision science. The three laws are not domain-specific models or sector-particular theories. They describe structural regularities that hold wherever decisions occur, in any substrate at any scale, with the same formal precision as the laws of motion or thermodynamics. The vision is that this status is achieved through accumulated empirical demonstration rather than asserted by proclamation, and that future textbooks treat the architecture as foundational scientific knowledge.
The democratisation claim. The three laws are not the property of researchers and specialists alone. Once recognised as universal, they belong to everyone who makes a decision. A farmer in Vietnam. A central bank governor. A teacher building a syllabus. A child learning to choose. The scope is limitless. Every substrate where decisions occur. Every discipline that studies them. The vision is that the three laws function as a shared structural language across all of these, the way Newton's laws cut across physics, engineering, and everyday intuition.
Institutional decisions. Markets, governance, healthcare, AI deployment, ecology, climate, scientific research itself. The vision focuses the work on decisions that affect populations, the broader living world, and the planet itself, where the cost of getting decisions wrong compounds across people, generations, substrates, ecosystems, and the natural systems that sustain all of them.
The mission is the present-tense operational statement. It describes what the studio produces, what the studio validates, and what the studio publishes. The mission has to be defensible against the actual operations of the studio. Every clause below maps onto observable activity.
Operational · present-tense
The studio produces original work, not commentary or synthesis. Every paper is a primary contribution. The structural focus distinguishes the work from psychological, behavioural, or domain-specific framings of the same problem space. The Foundational program is where the structural claims are developed.
The theory papers (IADT, UCT, ISP) are paired with empirical work. The empirical validation is what makes the theory survive the threshold of publication. Theory without validation is unfinished, and the studio's editorial discipline reflects that judgment.
The open-publication clause is operationally specific. Every paper carries a permanent DOI on Zenodo. No paywall, no subscription, no institutional access requirement. The methodology that produces the open research remains proprietary and separately licensable.
A horizon decades away. The daily practice of moving toward it. Seven principles the studio holds itself to, with or without anyone looking. Five codes the studio answers to when no external authority requires them. Each statement enforced internally. Each verifiable from outside.
Seven standards held against every paper, every conversation, every relationship the studio enters. Decision-making, rigour, independence, transparency, originality, curiosity, and courage.
Self-regulated science. Published standards, open methods, full results regardless of what they show.
Decision outcomes are governed by structural forces, not by stable attributes. The same multiplicative logic recurs at three scales and across domains.
Action under complexity is determined by the dynamic interaction of four forces. The interaction itself is the mechanism. Additive models systematically under-perform because they cannot represent it.
How individual decisions aggregate into institutional outcomes through three sequential phases. Ignition. Polarisation. Institutionalisation.
A criterion for when a structural pattern recurs across scales and domains. The pattern transfers only where structural identity holds.
Patrick Mehrhoff is a German entrepreneur, independent researcher, AI engineer, and author. He is the author of the three original theories that constitute the Mehrhoff Research Program. He built the work the studio carries.
Most practitioners spend a career inside one domain. He worked as a practitioner at six of the frontiers that redefined how society organises information, money, and value over the last two decades. The consumer internet, Swiss fintech, European monetary policy, Southeast Asian financial publishing, institutional crypto assets, and the first wave of applied AI.
The same structural observation appeared at every frontier. By 2019, on a whiteboard at crypto infrastructure provider Wyden in Zurich, the pattern had become visible to itself. It did not yet have a name. Four years before any AI language model became publicly available, the complete logic of the Three Laws of Decision-Making was already on the whiteboard.
The studio was built from Bangkok, without institutional affiliation and without external funding. The Rubens workshop model defines how it operates. The founder sets the intellectual direction at every decisive step. The tools and collaborators execute within it.
Tested against nine foundational scholars, three of them Nobel laureates, and across fifteen structural dimensions. Every cell is independently challengeable.
Every dimension independently challengeable.
Most frequently cited as predecessors.
Among the nine scholars tested.
Confirmed across all nine scholars.
The three laws describe the same multiplicative structure that governs decisions across scales. What each audience recognises in them is different. Each doorway below opens into the same set of laws, framed for the way you are most likely to find your own work inside them.
The literature in your field has been reporting tail-failure for decades. Outliers, noise, model misspecification. The three laws name a different culprit. The structural form of the model itself. Read the laws and find the place where the assumption you never questioned has been doing the work all along.
Every senior decision-maker has watched a model work on average and break where the decision mattered. The three laws name what is happening. The breakage is not an edge case the model failed to anticipate. It is the multiplicative architecture finding its zero. Read the laws and the pattern beneath every model break of your career becomes legible at once.
Each major institutional cascade of the past fifteen years was investigated as if it were unique. The reports document different operational failures in different sectors. The three laws read across the reports and recognise one structural pattern. Read the laws and the recurrence stops looking like coincidence.
Every philosophical tradition that has tried to describe the world has eventually arrived at the same conclusion. The three laws turn the conclusion into a working structural explanation. Decisions form. They cascade. Their patterns transfer across scales. Read the laws the way our studio reads them.
Most foundational research is finished before a student arrives. The three laws sit early enough in their life that the field around them is still to being created. A graduate student who reads them now enters a body of work inside its formative window. The reading path is curated for entry from any quantitative or social-science background.
Universities train within additive frameworks. Journals review within them. Regulators write rules under them. Funders evaluate against them. The three laws name the structural assumption beneath the entire foundational layer. It has been invisible because no curriculum, no review, no framework has ever required it to be examined. Read the corpus and the link your institution has been operating without becomes legible.
The first program states the architecture and demonstrates the laws that govern it. The second tests those laws against the empirical record of human decision-making. Together they establish the studio's canonical core and its first empirical substantiation. Further programs are in active preparation.
The three laws at the micro, macro, and meta scales, derived and stated formally. Plus the empirical evidence that the multiplicative architecture holds across biological, artificial, and hybrid substrates. Every paper in every other program traces its structural claims back to this canonical core.
The laws tested against the empirical record from every sector, industry, and discipline where humans make decisions. From financial risk to clinical judgement to educational selection to electoral behaviour, the same multiplicative architecture governs the outcome. Every test in the program substantiates the structural finding the foundational program advanced.
The first sketch of the Three Universal Laws. Drawn four years before any AI language model became publicly available.
Sketched at an office in Zurich. The board maps the direction of the markets, the forces driving them, the audiences they affected, the problems those audiences encountered, and the responses the market was developing. The structural logic that became the First, Second, and Third Laws is already on the board, in the language of practice.
Mehrhoff Research operates outside academia and outside industry. An independent science and research studio with no external funding, no board, and no university partnership. Founded 2019 in Zurich, domiciled in Tallinn, run from Bangkok.
The work is published open access. Every paper passes adversarial peer review before deposit. Every claim names the empirical conditions under which it would be falsified. Every citation traces to a primary source. The standard is not the institution. The standard is the work.
Deposited on Zenodo, permanently archived.
Data points analysed across all empirical validations.
Foundational and human decision-making.
No paywall, no journal embargo.
Press, academic peers, conference organisers, policy bodies, industry practitioners, and readers reach the studio here.
Six formats, from public keynote to closed doctoral seminar. The full range is welcome; the substance of the questions decides the invitation.
Four positions, from visiting researcher to fellowship, with two scheduled per calendar year. A residency produces sharper work than a single talk because the conversation extends.
Press kit with bios, headshots, and topic briefs is ready to download. Lectures, learning materials, and the architecture itself are licensable.