Wendelin Schnedler graduated as Master of Science in Statistics at Iowa State University in 1995 and as Diplom-Statistiker at Dortmund University in 1998 before joining the Bonn Graduate School of Economics. He enrolled in the the European Doctorate Program in Quantitive Economics and spent a year at the microeconometric laboratory of the Centre de la Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST) in Paris.

From September 2000 until September 2002, he worked at IZA. He submitted his thesis on the value of information in hidden action models in Summer 2002. In October 2002, he joined the Leverhulme Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) at the University of Bristol before moving to the University of Trier in 2004. Since January 2005, he works at the University of Heidelberg. During spring semester 2009, he taught as a stand-in professoer at Mannheim University. Since Summer 2011, he is full professor for Managerial Economics at the University of Paderborn.

Wendelin Schnedler became an IZA Research Affiliate in 1999 and an IZA Research Fellow in March 2003. His main fields of research are personnel economics, econometrics, and contract theory. He is also interested in the psychological foundations of incentives, evolutionary game theory, and experimental economics.