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.
Markets for Theories
(with Aurélien Baillon, Benjamin Tereick, and Tong V. Wang)
Abstract:
How much is a theory worth? We provide the first measure of the credence people assign to a theory, inferred from their willingness to bet on it. We introduce two market mechanisms: in an explicit theory market, a theory is priced as a portfolio of bets on the hypotheses it predicts; in an implicit theory market, traders report a credence directly and are matched with others reporting similar credences, with payoffs tied to the hypothesis-market behavior of the match. What the implicit mechanism elicits is invariant to which hypotheses happen to be testable. We demonstrate feasibility by implementing both mechanisms in a mobile-app experiment built around the real-effort study of Della Vigna and Pope (2018). Theory-market prices reflect the relative restrictiveness of the four theories considered, and the two mechanisms produce broadly comparable measures of theory credence.
Risk, Uncertainty, and the Prevention Puzzle: A Pre-Registered Experiment on Mental-Health Prevention
(with Aurélien Baillon, Francesco Capozza, and Farnaz Farzam)
Abstract:
We test, in a pre-registered experiment, whether three leading behavioral primitives — inverse-S probability weighting, cognitive uncertainty, and perceived ambiguity— predict demand for mental-health prevention. We survey 1500 French managing directors of very small and small enterprises, who face concentrated personal stakes for the adverse outcome, alongside a reference sample of 1000 French adults. Demand is measured by stated interest in, and willingness to pay for, a digital prevention application subsequently offered at no cost. None of the primitives robustly predicts demand, and elicited risk aversion does not differ between the two populations. Among three randomized information treatments, only the WHO definition of mental health raises stated interest, by 8.5 percentage points; a numerical risk estimate and a dental-hygiene analogy have no detectable effect, and the risk estimate is no more effective among respondents whose prior beliefs are least precise. Prevention demand appears to respond to the conceptual framing of risk rather than to its quantification.
