What do you like most about your job?

Drinking coffee! I mean that both literally and figuratively. It might sound a little strange, but what I enjoy about my work are the discussions with colleagues and/or students. These discussions get you thinking about research and related current events. And you start thinking about developments and potential improvements in teaching. I feel that continuing to innovate and improve my own research and teaching is very important and it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

Is there a project from this past year you are particularly proud of?

This past year I  spent a lot of time of a project that is trying to understand why people gamble. For example, gambling in casinos. Classic economics theories predict that people only gamble if they use different odds of winning than the opposition. If parties have the same opinion of the probability distribution, then people are prepared to share the risks, as it were (diversification in financing terms), but won’t create any additional risks (gambling) such as in a game of roulette in a casino.
However, the abovementioned findings don’t apply under a number of classical assumptions and we explored what would happen if you made alternative assumptions about the parties’ preferences.

The assumptions we use were developed in the 80s through experiments. They are referred to as ‘rank-dependent utilities’. We showed that in certain situations, 2 parties will gamble if they have the same probability distribution, but only if both are pessimistic. Basically this means that both overestimate their odds of winning and underestimate their odds of losing compared to the actual probability distribution.

In addition to this I was also secretly proud of winning an international actuarial career award earlier this year. The award is conferred by the Society of Actuaries, a US-based professional organisation. The picture here was made during the presentation of the award during a conference in the United States.

What don’t most colleagues know about you?

I think that by now everyone knows about watching football live in the stadium, so that doesn't really count. I think most colleagues would be surprised to know that I was born in Amsterdam. That's probably because I grew up in Limburg and Brabant and I don't really have an Amsterdam accent when I talk.