Dr A.R. Soetevent (1976) has been appointed Professor of Empirical Economics at the University of Amsterdam's (UvA) Faculty of Economics and Business.

Adriaan Soetevent has conducted empirical research on social interactions in household consumer behaviour. He has studied the factors that influence the amount of money donated in door-to-door collections, such as the available payment method and the opportunity to win a prize. His research in the coming years will focus on two key areas. Firstly, he will conduct empirical research on several key competitive product markets characterised by imperfect competition. Soetevent’s current research on the Dutch petrol market is part of this effort. His study established that efforts by the Dutch government to auction motorway petrol stations have not had an effect on price levels. Secondly, he will focus on issues at the interface of behavioural finance and industrial organisation. Amongst other research questions, he will focus on identifying the markets in which consumers take non-rational decisions and the extent to which product providers can capitalise on this irrationality. Soetevent will examine these questions through both experimentation and the gathering of field data.

Soetevent earned his doctorate degree with honours from the University of Groningen in 2004 and has since served as university lecturer in Industrial Organisation at the UvA. He is also programme director and fellow at the Tinbergen Institute for Economics. Soetevent is also fellow of the Amsterdam Centre for Law and Economics (ACLE). As part of his research fellowship, Soetevent spent time at Tufts University in Boston and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He received various research grants, including a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for his research project entitled Locational choice, price competition and consumer switching on networks. Soetevent has published in a range of international scientific journals such as American Economic Review, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and Journal of Applied Econometrics.