Hi — welcome to my homepage.
I am a researcher in Marketing and Associate Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. My research combines cognitive science and marketing to better understand consumer behaviour, managerial decision making, and behavioural interventions. I am particularly interested in uncovering the psychological mechanisms of behavioural interventions to explain what works, when, and for whom.
To that end, I aim to combine psychological theories with recent advances in machine learning and text modeling. My recent work also addresses climate risk communication and behaviour change interventions in more applied settings.
Before joining RSM in 2021, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School, working with Eric J. Johnson. I hold a PhD in Marketing and Management from the University of Geneva and a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Bern.
My research has been funded by an NWO Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council, a Convergence Resilient Delta seed grant and the Swiss National Science Foundation, and I have presented it in invited talks at, among others, UC Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Wharton, Stanford, and Chicago Booth. At RSM I teachn the MSc Marketing, the MBA and PhD program, and I supervise master theses in Marketing & Data Science.
Research
I combine cognitive theory, computational modeling and large-scale behavioural data to understand how people search for information, form preferences and respond to behavioural interventions. Methodologically, my work spans Bayesian hierarchical modeling of cognitive processes, process tracing (eye- and mouse-tracking) and large-scale text analysis with large language models.
Consumer search & choice
How consumers search for information and decide, and how computational models of cognition capture these processes.
- Search in service of choice (IJRM, 2025)
- Structural parameter interdependencies (Psychological Review, 2022)
Heterogeneity & generalizability
Why effect sizes differ across studies and populations, and what that means for building generalizable knowledge. This includes whether LLM-based digital twins can reproduce the heterogeneity of real consumers, and how their training data limits it.
- Exposing omitted moderators (PNAS, 2024)
- Measuring population heterogeneity (PNAS, 2025)
- The more you ask, the less you get (JMR, 2022)
- Training data limits the prediction of consumer heterogeneity by LLM-based digital twins (preprint, 2026)
Flood risk & climate risk communication
How people perceive their flood risk, and how to communicate climate risks so that people take protective action. This includes how risk information at the individual and system level is combined, how local weather shapes responses to climate risk information, and how subjective beliefs about flooding compare to objective risk. Part of this work is funded by a Convergence Resilient Delta seed grant.
- The flood will come: How flood risk communication at the system and individual level triggers motivation for private and collective action (working paper)
- Risk in context: How weather influences consumer responses to climate risk (working paper)
- Subjective and objective flood risk in the Netherlands (working paper)
Sustainable behaviour
How targeted interventions can move people to live more sustainably, and how motives for different sustainable behaviours overlap.
- A new lens on spillovers (preprint, 2024)
- Empowering a sustainable future (preprint, 2023)
News
- SPA 9 moved out of our living room: SPA X Wijnwerk — bi/bye Business:Conditions.
- New preprint: Training data limits the prediction of consumer heterogeneity by LLM-based digital twins.
- Promoted to Associate Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management.
- Published in IJRM: Search in service of choice.
- Published in PNAS: Measuring population heterogeneity requires heterogeneous populations.
- Awarded an NWO Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council.
Selected Publications
All Publications
Grants & Awards
- Seed Grant, Leeds School Research Initiative for Global Business and Citizen Wellbeing (with Nicholas Reinholtz and Emily Gallagher), $20,000
- Veni Grant, NWO Dutch Research Council, €320,000
- Seed Grant, Convergence Resilient Delta Initiative (with Sebastian Gabel and Tatiana Filatova), €326,000
- Kilts Center Visiting Faculty Fellow, Chicago Booth
- Kickstarter Grant, Convergence Initiative (with Sebastian Gabel), €29,954
- Humboldt Residency Program “Our Precious Resources”, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Postdoc Mobility Scholarship, Swiss National Science Foundation, CHF 197,000
- Project Grant, Swiss National Science Foundation (applicant Benjamin Scheibehenne; I conceptualized and wrote the research plan), CHF 239,721
- Student Award, Society for Mathematical Psychology
- Doc Mobility Scholarship, Swiss National Science Foundation, CHF 40,255
Invited Talks (selected)
- Stanford University · UC Berkeley · TU Delft · Finance Solutions for a Resilient Delta · University of Geneva
- Yale University · KU Leuven
- Booth School of Business, University of Chicago · TU Delft · Tilburg University · LMU Munich
- The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania · Princeton University · Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- University of Warwick · Uppsala University · Maastricht University
- University of St. Gallen · Rotterdam School of Management · TUM School of Management
- Boğaziçi University, Istanbul · Columbia University
- University of Zurich · Max Planck Institute for Human Development
I regularly present at ACR, SJDM, SPUDM, the Choice Symposium and the Colorado Winter Conference on Marketing and Cognition, and co-chaired sessions at the Choice Symposium in 2023 and 2026. See my CV for all conference presentations.
Teaching
- Noise: Understanding Errors in Human Judgement and Prediction — MSc Marketing, RSM (design and delivery)
- MBA Summer School — MBA, RSM (design, coordination and delivery)
- Meta-analyses and Meta-studies: Research Synthesis and Generalizability — PhD, Global School in Empirical Research Methods (GSERM)
- Networking — PhD Workshop, RSM
- Consumer Behavior and Current Topics in Marketing Research — PhD courses, RSM (one session each)
- Preferences and External Validity of Lab Decisions — PhD, EADM Summer School
- Earlier courses on consumer behaviour, consumer research, R, decision making and false memories at the Universities of Geneva, Freiburg and Bern
I supervise master theses in Marketing & Data Science at Erasmus University and review for journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, Psychological Review and PNAS.
SPA (Some People Around)
Contact
Email: krefeldschwalb@rsm.nl · a.krefeldschwalb@gmail.com
Address: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Appointments: Email for appointment