Research Projects

My research focusses on people’s intrinsic motivation to engage in pro-environmental behaviours, such as choosing sustainable transport options. In particular, I am interested in the underlying processes and factors that influence people’s intrinsic motivation to act in an environmentally friendly manner. I study whether and how incentives and measures can be developed and implemented to strengthen and increase people’s intrinsic motivation to engage in pro-environmental behaviour.

Urban Smart Measures and Incentives for quality of Life Enhancement (U-SMILE)

Accessibility and sustainability are important conditions for vital and resilient cities, but are under pressure especially in urban areas. Congestion, local air quality, parking; these are different challenges that, however, have in common that effective solutions require behavioural change in addition to technological innovation. This project aims to develop, test and evaluate “smart” measures to affect behaviour. The measures are smart in the first place because they offer an innovative mix of negative and positive financial incentives, thus bypassing some of the main disadvantages of pricing (notably a very limited acceptability) and of rewarding (in particular limited budgets and induced demand). The measures are also smart because they have a highly innovative technological character, not only from the conceptual viewpoint (e.g. tradable driving permits) but also from the technological perspective (e.g. linking real time automated vehicle identification to virtual market environments). These smart measures will be studied from a multidisciplinary perspective, where forces are joined among economists, psychologists, traffic engineers and policy analysts, and will be evaluated from the perspectives of effectiveness, acceptability, and efficiency – paying attention to key urban challenges such as accessibility and environmental quality. The project has a very strong rooting in the urban reality as the case studies are undertaken jointly with Amsterdam Zuidas, Rotterdam, Groningen, and the Amsterdam ArenA area. In the psychological sub-project, we will study to what extent smart incentives can promote durable changes in a wide range of sustainable travel behaviours. We will examine the conditions under which smart incentives are likely to promote sustainable travel behaviour, and the processes that drive behaviour changes. We will study to what extent and how individual characteristics influence the effectiveness and acceptability of smart incentives. The project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).