Martijn van den Assem receives Vidi Grant from NWO
Research fellow Martijn van den Assem has been awarded a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for study on economic behaviour on TV. Martijn will receive a Vidi grant of € 800.000 to develop his own innovative line of research and to set up a research group.
The Vidi programme is aimed at experienced researchers who have carried out several years of successful research after obtaining their doctorate. Its grants fund the work of these academics for a further five years. Along with the Veni and Vici grants, the Vidi grants form part of the NWO’s Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. Within the scheme, researchers are free to submit their own topic for funding. In this way, NWO stimulates curiosity-driven and innovative research.
Research proposal
The focus of Martijn van Assem’s study is economic behaviour on TV. It centres on the question of how people make decisions when a large sum of money is at stake. Martijn uses television game shows to analyse this aspect of economic behaviour. The large cash prizes and the repetition of clear-cut dilemmas mean that some game shows can be seen as unique behavioural experiments that can provide answers in the debate about the external validity of conventional experiments.
About
Martijn van den Assem is an Associate Professor of Finance at VU University Amsterdam. His research interests particularly include themes from the fields of financial and behavioral economics. Most of his work is empirical, focused on individual choice, and based on non-standard data. Martijn holds a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam (2008). He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO).