Blog Centre for Public Health in Economics and Business

It is predicted that within the next decade, around a third of current full-time occupations will be transformed into augmented services delivered by teams of humans and machines – and we already see this transition now, given that many of us are nowadays co-working with AI such as Chat GPT. Given the inevitable rise of human-robot teams, it is imperative to investigate how both the human client and the human co-worker can embrace human-robot teams, called cobotic teams. This is what Jenny van Doorn, Professor of Services Marketing, has set out to do in much of her research. An article on the unintended consequences of human-robot collaboration in healthcare services, that Van Doorn co-authored, was recently published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

A new study by current and former FEB researchers Rob Alessie, Viola Angelini, Gerard van den Berg, Jochen Mierau and Gianmaria Niccodemi sheds light on the long-term health implications of economic conditions in early life. The study, titled "Using Data on Biomarkers and Siblings to Study Early-Life Economic Determinants of Type-2 Diabetes," finds a correlation between being born under adverse economic conditions and the onset of type-2 diabetes later in life.

We are happy to share the summary report of the interdisciplinary Automation Workshops organized by Femke Cnossen (FSS), Milena Nikolova (FEB) and Richard Rijnks (FSS) in April 2023.

The Centre of Public Health in Economics and Business (CPHEB) and Lifelines organized a meetup on the 20th of April at the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) to introduce Lifelines to researchers at FEB, to guage interest in working with Lifelines data and to explore potential collaborations, between researchers at FEB and between FEB and Lifelines.

With unchanged policy, healthcare will inevitably get stuck. The Dutch population is ageing and healthcare is becoming unaffordable. Steady as we go is not an option, we need to switch gears. Healthcare needs to innovate. But innovating can be done in many different ways, the question is which direction we want go as a society.

Health – a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being – is a crucial determinant of people’s happiness. This is something Julia Storch, PhD candidate at FEB’s Marketing department, firmly believes. However, she knows that engaging in health-promoting practices and abstaining from health-preventing behaviors can at times be easier said than done. Her mantra is that when we understand why exactly people struggle to lead a healthy lifestyle, we can come up with interventions to help them overcome possible obstacles. That is why Storch dedicated her PhD research to investigating how consumers can be motivated to implement healthy food choices and physical activity into their daily lives. In this blog article, Storch reflects on the research process and discusses her findings.

With his research Assistant Professor Ahmed Skali aims to discover what triggers the rise of destructive social movements (and linked conspiracy theories) that threaten our social and political institutions and what motivates people to participate in these movements. Together with co-authors Ho Fai Chan (Queensland University of Technology), Stephanie Rizio (FEB) and Benno Torgler (Queensland University of Technology), he investigates whether social distancing restrictions are met with conspiratorial backlash, and if so, why, and whether there are public health consequences.

In his work, Associate Professor Stefan Pichler focuses on the economic consequences of infectious diseases and is an expert on sick leave. In recent research together with Johanna Catherine Maclean (George Mason University) and Nicolas R. Ziebarth (ZEW Mannheim), Pichler and his co-authors study the coverage, utilization, and welfare effects of mandated sick pay in the US.