PhD students

Duan Su (2022- exp. 2027)

Project: Sustainable Behavior in Transportation and Energy Use

Description: Individual sustainable behavior is important for fostering environmental protection and resource conservation, but people understand less about the social factors and cannot develop successful policies. Guided by behavioral economics, this study considers the theory of social preference, social interaction, and information friction and tests their influence on non-peak hours driving, orderly parking of bicycles, and reducing electricity use. With field experiments and panel data analysis, this study will investigate potential strategies to promote green practices in the context of commuting and electricity and aims to make valuable contributions towards sustainable policies and interventions.

Lieke Voorintholt (2021 - exp. 2025)

Project:  Investigating Prosocial Preferences: Essays on Environmental Attitudes, Donating, and Volunteering 

Description: Prosocial behavior plays a key role in advancing societal goals such as equity and sustainability. This thesis explores the determinants of prosocial behavior, including charitable giving, and examines how climate change attitudes are influenced by, and may in turn influence, other outcomes. The first chapter applies a theoretical framework to derive testable predictions on whether donating and volunteering act as substitutes or complements, using Dutch survey data to test these predictions. The second chapter examines financially compensated volunteering using German administrative data, exploiting a policy change to assess how additional payment impacts the duration of volunteering, as well as volunteers' donations and market labor earnings. The third chapter investigates whether becoming a grandparent influences worries about climate change, and finds no significant effect using a representative British panel. Finally, the fourth chapter presents a survey experiment showing that environmental framing, compared to financial framing, diminishes individuals' understanding of long-term experimental growth. Through this collection of papers that combine (applied) theory and observational data, I aim to enhance the general understanding of prosocial preferences. 

Lennart Stangenberg (exp. Summer 2025)

Project: Economic Choice under Climate Change Pressure: Information, Coordination, and the Challenges of Inaction.

Description: How do expectations, information, and policy design shape collective climate action? This research explores these factors across three studies. The first study examines how expectations of future technological progress influence group coordination in a laboratory setting with consumption-based externalities. While technological improvements could enhance overall welfare, their mere possibility leads to delayed action, preventing groups from realizing these benefits. The second study investigates how access to and observability of information affect coordination in a threshold public good game. It finds that endogenously acquired information improves contributions, especially when acquisition decisions are public, as they allow individuals to signal commitment. The third study analyzes Dutch housing market data to assess the information value of energy labels. While labels are associated with price premiums, their impact is limited, suggesting that buyers rely on other signals to assess energy efficiency. Together, these studies highlight behavioral and informational barriers to climate action, emphasizing the need for well-designed incentives, transparency, and commitment mechanisms. 

Mark van Oldeniel (2025)

Project: Information Timing, Preferences, and (Behavioral) Economic Decision-Making

Description:  This thesis contains four studies in behavioral and experimental economics. The first study uses a lab experiment to examine how people prefer to receive information about gains versus losses, and finds that people favor separated information about gains, but show no clear preference for losses. The second lab-experimental study investigates endogenous cooling-off periods in negotiations, showing that a substantial minority of proposers impose them, and that the possibility to impose them reduces proposers’ offers and responders’ earnings while the rate of failed negotiations remains unchanged. The third study uses a novel auction dataset to study round (jump) bidding, and finds that bidders frequently bid round numbers and tend to overpay when doing so. The final study is a field experiment investigating consumer demand for price stability by measuring consumer willingness to pay for a gasoline price cap. Consumers are willing to pay a substantial premium to obtain the price cap, but willingness to pay does not correlate with consumer characteristics. 

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