My research focuses on behavioral economics. My current work reflects my broad interests in both experiments and theory and covers different aspects of decision making under risk and uncertainty. A common theme in my papers is that people do not understand probabilities and risks well, and therefore they neither insure themselves nor take preventive measures optimally.

PUBLICATIONS

When risk perception gets in the way: Probability weighting and underprevention.
(with Aurélien Baillon, Han Bleichrodt, Johannes Jaspersen, and Richard Peter)
Operations Research (July 2020)

Informing, simulating experience, or both: A field experiment on phishing risks.
(with Aurélien Baillon, Jeroen de Bruin, Bram van Dijk, and Evelien van de Veer)
PloS one (December 2019)

Zooming in on ambiguity attitudes. 
(with Aurélien Baillon)
International Economic Review (November 2018)

WORKING PAPERS

Ambiguity attitudes in sexual context

Abstract:

This paper aims at studying whether ambiguity attitudes differ in the presence of a sexual context. In an experiment I used sexual context in the source of uncertainty, in the outcome and in the combination of both. Measuring ambiguity attitudes with the aversion and insensitivity indices developed by Baillon et al. (2018), the results show that people are ambiguity seeking and ambiguity insensitive in the absence of sexual context. Ambiguity seeking behavior is robust to presence of sexual context in the source and/or outcome. Ambiguity insensitivity, on the other hand, is strongest when the sexual context appears in a natural source with real-life events. When the outcome is sexual and the source is artificially created in the lab, however, people get closer to neutrality and insensitivity disappears. The results suggest that sexual context matters, even for non-sexual decisions.

Attachment Styles and Life Outcomes: Exploring the Mediating Role of Trust in Work Satisfaction
(with Chen Li)

Abstract:

We examine the impact of adult attachment styles on real-life outcomes, specifically work satisfaction levels. Using a cross-sectional data from the LISS panel that is representative of the Dutch population, we explore this relationship using causal mediation analysis. We identify individuals’ trust on other people as a potential factor that can mediate this relationship. We find that insecure attachment significantly reduces satisfaction levels. People with insecure attachment styles have significantly lower scores in important components of quality of life such as how satisfied a person is about their career, working hours, earnings and work atmosphere. In line with the literature, we find that adult attachment styles have a negative impact on people’s beliefs about others’ trustworthiness as well. Trust can be one of the channels that help to explain the underlying mechanism why attachment styles have an impact on real-life work-related factors.

The Theory Market
(with Aurélien Baillon, Benjamin Tereick, and Tong V. Wang)

Abstract:

How much is a theory worth? In this paper, we propose to measure the credence people give to a theory by their willingness to bet on it. We introduce two alternative market mechanisms to do so. In the first type of markets a theory is defined as an explicit portfolio of bets on hypotheses predicted by the theory. Deriving the hypotheses is thus crucial, but this step can be avoided in the second type of markets we propose. There, a theory is an implicit portfolio of positions, and rewards are determined on the premise that experts with the same theory credence also have the same predictions about hypotheses being confirmed by empirical tests. To demonstrate feasibility, we implemented both version, and obtained coherent measures of theory credence.