I am an Associate Professor of Economics at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视 School of Economics. My research combines behavioral, experimental, and labor economics to study how individuals make decisions in education and labor markets, especially in response to competition, incentives, social dynamics, and emerging technologies. I am particularly interested in how behavioral biases, such as overconfidence and motivated reasoning, interact with institutional settings 鈥� including schools, workplaces, and digital platforms 鈥攖o shape outcomes and inequalities.
A part of my work explores how people respond to performance pressure and decision-making under uncertainty. I examine, for instance, how students set goals and respond to competition, and how modest incentives can help them adjust to overly ambitious expectations, thereby improving motivation and performance. These insights extend to the workplace, where I study how employers interact with algorithmic hiring tools鈥攚hen they rely on them, when they override them, and how moral and reputational concerns shape those choices.
I also study how social preferences and informal norms influence cooperation, particularly within networks. My research shows that fairness concerns and social context have a significant impact on individual contributions to collective goals, whether in the classroom, within organizations, or in society more broadly. This work contributes to a better understanding of how institutions can be designed to account for human behavior鈥攊ts biases, social embeddedness, and interaction with technology鈥攖o foster more inclusive and effective education and labor market policies.