The Department of Spatial Economics together with the John Stuart Mill institute of the Free University Amsterdam are looking for candidates for a Postdoc position on ‘Behavioural Modelling for Participatory Value Evaluation’, as part of the NWO-MVI project: “Participatory Value Evaluation: a new assessment model for promoting social acceptance of sustainable energy policies”.

Worldwide, governments and firms invest in sustainable energy technologies, projects and policies to decarbonise energy systems. The investment decisions are often made on the basis of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). However, classical CBAs have difficulty incorporating citizens’ ethical considerations concerning the procedural and distributive aspects of such decisions and it is expected that these considerations can affect the social acceptance of decisions on sustainable energy policies. This is problematic because lack of local social acceptance increases the risks of failures and delays of sustainable energy policies. Dutch practitioners consider the use of Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) to evaluate sustainable energy policies as this approach has the potential to include citizens’ ethical considerations in real-world economic policy analysis. PVE is a new assessment model in which citizens choose a portfolio of policies given one or more constraints (budget/sustainability target). Using these individual choices we will estimate behavioural choice models that subsequently form the basis for an economic evaluation of different policies. The key distinction between CBA and PVE is that CBA infers welfare effects of (government) projects from individuals’ monetary willingness to pay in (hypothetical markets), whereas PVE infers welfare effects from individuals’ preferences over the allocation of (public) budgets. A demo-version of a PVE that was recently conducted for the Transport Authority Amsterdam can be found online.

www.participatie-begroting.nl
 
The key objective of the research project is investigating whether PVEs can deliver on two promises:
1) Inclusion of citizens’ ethical considerations in quantitative real-world economic policy assessment;
2) Contributing to citizens’ acceptance of decisions on sustainable energy policies by recognizing distributive and procedural considerations.
 
The research design consists of two closely related and complementary postdoc projects.
 

 

A postdoc based at the VU Amsterdam (0,5 fte) will develop novel behavioural choice models that measure the extent to which citizens are willing to forego personal benefits to foster ethical considerations. This postdoc will also use these estimated ethically informed utility functions for the economic assessment of sustainable energy policies.
 
A postdoc at TU Delft (0,5 fte) will explore whether different applications of PVE can foster procedural justice by including the possibility of deliberation and co-design and study how these PVE applications impact citizens’ social acceptance of sustainable energy policies.

Candidates for the VU post-doc are expected to have a university PhD degree in econometrics, applied mathematics or economics or to be close to finishing their PhD. They need to have proven experience with econometric modelling and statistical programming where experience with programming in open source packages such as Ox, R and Python are a pre. Applicants should have an open and interdisciplinary attitude as they have to work in a team with people with various scientific backgrounds. Proficiency in English in speaking and writing is essential as well as evidence of scientific performance in the form of journal publications in scientific journals.

The appointment will be for a total of three years. You can find information about our excellent fringe benefits of employment at our website.
 
The salary will be in accordance with university regulations for academic personnel, and depending on experience, range from a minimum of  € 3238,00 up to a maximum of € 4084,00 gross per month, based on a full-time employment.

The School of Business and Economics (SBE) aims to combine high quality education with excellent research. The School offers four Bachelor’s programmes (Economics and Business Economics, Econometrics and Operations Research, Business Administration and International Business Administration), seven Master’s programmes among which the MSc in Spatial, Transport and Environmental Economics (STREEM), two research masters among which the Tinbergen Institute’s MPhil programme, and seventeen postgraduate programmes. The school has several research groups with an outstanding international reputation. SBE accommodates approximately 4,300 students and 1,700 postgraduate students. Over 500 staff members are employed at the School.
 
Supervision of the postdoc is shared by the Department of Spatial Economics and the John Stuart Mill college. The department of Spatial Economics at the school of Economics and Business is engaged in many economic problems in which space and the environment play a prominent role. The 60 staff members are involved in both fundamental research as well as in national and international commissioned research. With this research, the department has gained national and international recognition, as shown by the large number of international publications and awards. The department is involved in several teaching programs at the Bachelor and Master level.
 
The John Stuart Mill college seeks to educate tomorrows leaders in order to develop better decisions for a better world. It is an interdisciplinary college that seeks to develop new perspectives on complex questions drawing from expertise from philosophy, political science and economics rather than relying exclusively on one of these perspectives.