Climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat, and tackling them depends to a large extent on human behaviour.
Households, consumers and firms make many of the decisions that shape the transition: whether to renovate a home, switch to a heat pump, change how they travel, or buy more sustainable products. Behavioural economics shows that these decisions often depart from what standard economic models predict. People weigh losses more heavily than gains, put little weight on future benefits, respond to how choices are framed, and act under uncertainty and limited attention.
Understanding how people actually make environmental decisions is therefore essential for designing policies that work. Behavioural economics has become a central lens for environmental policy in recent years. Its main empirical tool is the experiment, ranging from controlled laboratory studies to large-scale field trials run with governments and companies.
To turn these insights into effective environmental policy, researchers need a solid grounding in behavioural theories of decision-making. They also need rigorous experimental designs that produce credible and generalizable evidence, and an understanding of how their research connects to the policymakers and practitioners who act on it.
To meet this demand, this PhD expert course focuses on behavioural economics and how it applies to environmental decisions. On the theory side, it covers decision-making under risk, contrasting expected utility theory with prospect theory, as well as time preferences, from standard discounting to present bias.
Methods
On the methods side, it introduces experimental economics in the lab and in the field, and discusses current challenges in experimental design, such as generalization and policy impact. A hands-on workshop at the Antwerp Social Lab (tASL), a core research facility of the University of Antwerp, introduces participants to multimodal research methods. These combine behavioural observations, physiological signals, digital traces and self-reports to study concepts such as attention, engagement, emotion and stress.
Sessions with practitioners from organisations such as PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the Behavioural Insights Network Netherlands (BIN NL) will bring in insights from the boundary between science and policy and show how experimental evidence finds its way into policy and practice.
Amsterdam - Antwerp
A five-day event with methods lectures, keynote speakers bridging methods to field applications, and paper presentation sessions with discussants from the pool of participants and senior researchers. Participants will stay in Amsterdam from Monday to Wednesday and will then travel to Antwerp for the second part of the Interdisciplinary School (Wednesday – Friday) including fields trips to organizations working in the field in between.