On 19 April 2012 Steffen Andersen (SA) received the FUHU Research Prize 2012. FUHU Chairman Birgit Aagaard-Svendsen motivated the prize as follows:

Steffen Andersen has in a very short time span accumulated an impressive number of top publications in Economics. He is becoming a role model for younger Danish economists.

SA has both contributed methodological innovations within behavioral and experimental economics & finance and applied these methods to a wide variety of interesting economic problems. SA publishes in the very best international journals within economics and finance. His research is well cited and has a large impact.

SA’s industry collaboration is carried out for example with the Federal Highway Administration in Florida. The project aims to test and improve highway revenue collection through experimentation. Additionally, SA has cooperated with private companies in Chicago for testing and improving incentive contracts for temporary workers. The companies are now using information from experiments to improve the quality of short-term temporary workers. 

On Steffen Andersen: Steffen is 35 years old and has since July 2011 been Professor (mso) of behavioural and experimental economics & finance at the Department of Economics of CBS. SA’s got his PhD from the University of Copenhagen. He has visited University of Chicago, University of Central Florida, and Stanford University for longer periods. SA has an extensive international network of co-authors and collaborators within experimental and behavioural economics and finance – probably THE hottest area in economics & finance presently.

SA has four publications in the world’s leading journals in both economics and finance. (American Economic Review (x2), Econometrica, Review of Financial Studies) and in addition a series of publications in other top journals (Theory and Decision (x2), Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, International Economic Review, Applied Economics and Experimental Economics).

SA develops experimental design, including field experiments, that assigns individuals randomly to control and treatment groups. This allows him to elicit causal effects of the treatments. He has applied these methods to fundamental economic problems such as the separation of agents’ risk preferences from their time preferences. He has also applied the methods to e.g. gender differences in negotiations, the effects of sudden death on financial choices and the effect of different forms of road pricing.