About

I am an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In my research I combine laboratory experiments, field experiments, and naturally occurring data to better understand human decision making, primarily in the areas of risk and uncertainty and strategic interaction.

My work has appeared in leading economic and interdisciplinary journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, Nature Human Behaviour, and the American Economic Review. It has, amongst others, been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Financial Times, the Independent, the Times, and the Daily Mail.

I am a research fellow at Tinbergen Institute and an external fellow at the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx) at the University of Nottingham.

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Prince: An Improved Method for Measuring Incentivized Preferences

Cathleen A. Johnson, Aurélien Baillon, Han Bleichrodt, Zhihua Li, Dennie van Dolder, Peter P. Wakker

This paper introduces the Prince incentive system for measuring preferences. Prince is a variation of the random incentive system that enhances isolation and makes incentive compatibility more transparent to subjects. It allows for the precise and direct elicitation of indifference values as with matching while having the clarity and validity of choice lists. Prince avoids the opaqueness of Becker-DeGroot-Marschak’s mechanism and precludes strategic behavior in adaptive experiments. Using Prince, we shed new light on willingness to accept and the major components of decision under uncertainty: utilities, subjective beliefs, and ambiguity attitudes. Prince outperforms a classical implementation of the random incentive system.

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Incentives, Performance and Choking in Darts

Bouke Klein Teeselink, Rogier J.D. Potter van Loon, Martijn J. van den Assem, Dennie van Dolder

This paper examines the effect of incentives on the performance of darts players. We analyze four data sets covering a total of 28,761 darts matches of professional, amateur, and youth players. The game of darts offers an attractive natural research setting, because performance can be observed at the individual level and without obscuring effects of risk considerations and behavior of others. We find that amateur and youth players perform better under moderately higher incentives, but choke when the incentives are really high. Professional players similarly display better performance under higher incentives, but appear less susceptible of choking. These results speak to a growing literature on the limits of increasing incentives as a recipe for better performance.

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Can the Market Divide and Multiply? A Case of 807 Percent Mispricing under Short-Selling Constraints

Marc B.J. Schauten, Martijn J. van den Assem, Dennie van Dolder, Remco C.J. Zwinkels

This paper documents a strong violation of the law of one price surrounding a large-size rights issue. If prices are right, the relation between the prices of shares and rights should follow the outcome of a simple calculation. In the case of Royal Imtech N.V. prices deviated sharply from the theoretical prediction. Throughout the term of the rights, investors were buying shares at prices that were up to nine times what they should have been given the price of the rights. Short-selling constraints explain the failure of arbitrage as a safeguard of market efficiency.

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At the VU Amsterdam I teach Behavioral Finance and Real Estate (3rd year undergraduate). This course provides a behavioral perspective on real estate decision making and markets. Students learn how behavioral biases affect the decisions of participants in real estate markets, and how the bounded rationality of market participants can explain real estate market dynamics. In my part of the course, I provide students with a psychological perspective on negotiations, property valuations, and mortgage choices.

In addition, I provide tutorials in Finance (2nd year undergraduate). In this course we build the foundation for the study of corporate finance and investments. The focus is on financial decision-making in theory and practice. Our coverage of core finance topics includes: i) capital budgeting, ii) asset pricing, and iii) financial investment.

Finally, I supervise MSc theses on topics related to behavioral finance. Interested students can contact me by email.

Previously, I taught tutorials in behavioural economics and supervised BSc and MSc theses on topics related to behavioral economics and behavioral finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

• d.van.dolder@vu.nl
• +31 20 598 42 02
• De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands