prof. dr. A.R. (Adriaan) Soetevent
“‘No man is an island entire of itself,’ wrote the English poet John Donne in 1624. The thought that individual people (and firms) do not make choices in isolation but operate within a social context sparked my research agenda. During my PhD at the University of Groningen, I started to examine the connection between social interactions and economic outcomes. This topic still is my prime motivation for doing research, together with a deeply felt need to bring theory to data using (quasi-)randomized designs for credible causal inference. Whenever possible, I implement field experiments – randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in which participants make choices in their normal day-to-day environment – to establish causality.
Most of my research focuses on how people interact and how firms compete, applied to a wide range of contexts such as charitable giving, peer effects and coordination in consumption, price competition and collusion between firms and the impact of (personalized) feedback on performance.”
Prof. dr. Adriaan Soetevent holds the chair of Microeconomics at the University of Groningen. He coordinates the research line in Industrial, Behavioral and Experimental economics, is member of the GrEELab laboratory for experimental economic research and the current chair of the EE&F deparment.
Prior to returning to Groningen in 2013, Soetevent was part of the Amsterdam School of Economics at the University of Amsterdam, first as assistant professor and as of 2010 as full professor in Empirical Microeconomics. From 2010 to 2013, he served as Director of Graduate Studies at the Tinbergen Institute and from 2022 to 2025, he chaired the Institutional Review Board at FEB.
Dr. Soetevent has published his work in leading peer-reviewed journals, including American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, Journal of Public Economics and RAND Journal of Economics. He also regularly serves as a referee for these and other journals and is associate editor of the Netherlands Economics Review (De Economist)
RePEc consistently ranks Soetevent among the top 7% of all economists. NWO has awarded him a VENI grant for his project on Firms’ locational choice and competition on networks.
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