PhD students

Duan Su (2022- exp. 2025)

Project: Sustainable Behavior in Transportation and Energy Use

Mark van Oldeniel (2018- exp. 2024)

Project: Information Processing and Economic Decision Making

Lennart Stangenberg (2018- exp. 2024)

Project: Individual actions and political measures to mitigate climate change: complements or substitutes? 

Anouk Schippers (2023)

Project: Prosocial behavior in markets

Description: What motivates people to behave with others in mind? Economists have long been concerned about the underprovision of public goods because people do not fully incorporate the positive externalities and tend to use opportunities to free ride on the efforts of others. From protecting the environment to donating to charitable causes, there are numerous examples in which society as a whole benefits from individual acts, but where the socially optimal level may not be attainable in case the free rider problem is too severe. Fortunately, though, an uplifting message from a growing body of literature is that people often move beyond self-interest and free riding, and instead behave in a prosocial way. This thesis contributes to this literature by presenting lab and eld experiments that study the determinants and consequences of prosocial behavior.

First Job: Assistant professor (education profile), University of Groningen.

Gert-Jan Romensen (2020)

Project: Feedback Design and Preference Elicitation: Field Experiments in Digital Economics

Description: This thesis aims to contribute to this discussion with four eld experiments that explore the potential of digital technology in improving the outcomes of workers, students, and consumers. The first two experiments focus on the workplace. Productivity data from a new monitoring technology are used to detect worker-level areas of improvement, to tailor feedback, and to evaluate the impact of the feedback programs. The third experiment is in education. A digital learning platform is developed to measure student effort and to target this effort directly as a means to improve learning outcomes. The final experiment uses a communication technology in a natural field setting with many consumers to implement an incentive-compatible experimental method that elicits individual risk attitudes repeatedly.

First Job: Postdoc/assistant professor, University of Groningen.

Tadas Bruzikas (2017)

Project: Understanding Retail Gasoline Pricing: An Empirical Approach

Description: The thesis is about competition between retailers. The first project uses a large data set comprising daily retail gasoline prices in the Netherlands. We consider the emergence of lower-cost    unmanned gasoline retailers and how this changed competition in the period 2005-2011. Our main finding is that the lower costs have a direct negative effect on the prices at the transformed stations as well as a lower spillover effects on the nearby competitors. In the second project, we provide a theoretical argument for show why lower-priced retailers have an incentive to announce discounts off a reference price that reveal the underlying cost level to consumers. Then we give a theoretical explanation for the regular, weekly additional (bonus) discounts that we observe in the Dutch retail gasoline market. In a short companion paper, we discuss the empirical relevance of the widely accepted stopping rule in search with rational consumers and recall. We provide experimental evidence that shows that in price search, subjects exhibit behavior consistent risk- or loss-averse risk-attitudes. In the final paper we employ an hourly-price dataset to show that retail prices react quicker to the positive changes in the retail-price recommendations. Using real-time traffic data, we reject the hypothesis that hourly fluctuations in consumer demand explains the observed price changes.

First Job: Customer Insights Analyst, Telia Company, Lithuania

Flóra Felsö (2017) 

Project: Empirical studies of consumer and government purchase decisions.

First Job: Researcher, Technical University Delft, The Netherlands