After a successful call for proposals, we went through the proposals received. After careful review, we are happy to report that we selected two projects that we believe have a good chance of success and very relevant research questions. IBEX will help them through financial support for the project and logistical support.
Congratulations to Mariëlle Rietkerk and Gerdien de Vries, with their project ‘Psychological barriers to laundry load shifts’. Households play an important role in the energy transition as producers and consumers of electricity. To reduce the strain on the electricity grid, households can provide flexibility by shifting their electricity consumption to off-peak hours when grid congestion is low. Mariëlle Rietkerk and Gerdien de Vries will look at whether and how psychological barriers prevent load shifting in households, opening new interventions to reduce the strain on electricity grid.
Congratulations also to Laurens Rook with his project ‘Forecasting Under Changing Regimes: A Behavioral Experiment into the Role of Bayesian Surprise’. It is important for decision-makers to correctly identify an imminent regime shift in the market, technology, or society, and to do so early on. This is, however, notoriously difficult for decision-makers to do. Consistent with the Bayesian brain hypothesis, surprise may help or hinder decision-makers in correctly making probability judgments. The objective of the proposed experiment is to find out whether system neglect can be overcome by Bayesian surprise.