3 VENI grants for ERIM Members

The VENI grant is part of IRIS (Innovational Research Incentives Scheme) and aims to “support outstanding young researchers of exceptional talent and originality who have a great enthusiasm for the conduct of challenging, ground-breaking research. Such research is necessarily a high-risk activity”. Therefore, with this grant, NWO offers researchers who have only recently completed their doctorate the opportunity to develop their ideas during three years. The grant is for a maximum of 250,000 euro.

ERIM is very proud and congratulates the three recipients with this great achievement.

At Erasmus School of Economics, two more researchers received the VENI grant: Teresa Bago d’Uva and Lennart Hoogerheide. This sums up to a total of five VENI grants in one year for the Economy and Business Administration faculties, which is a record.

Aurélie Lemmens: “International ties in the launch and adoption of new products”
Lemmens project aims at studying the role of international ties in the launch and adoption of new products, with a focus on new pharmaceutical drugs: “My ambition is to understand firms’ decision-making when it turns to international launches and the role of international regulatory bodies therein”. International ties in launch and adoption are of key importance for national and supra-national policy makers, as well as for international firms.

Lemmens: “Getting the VENI grant is, first of all, a privilege and an honor. I was very proud to learn my proposal was awarded and ranked at the 4th position in the priority ranking made by the NWO. For this, I am very thankful to ERIM and ESE for the help and support they provided me. Besides the prestige, the grant will also offer great opportunities for my research. The Marketing Section alleviates the teaching load of faculty members who receive grants in a substantial way, meaning that I will have more time for my research. This is what I call the “virtuous circle” of getting research funds!”

Aurélie Lemmens, Associate Professor Erasmus School of Economics, uses state-of-the-art econometric models to shed light on a broad range of marketing-related issues. Her main research interests concerns the investigation of the disparities that exist between consumers across the globe, and in particular, of the mechanisms of interaction across countries (international ties, cross-country spill-over effects). Aurélie Lemmens also received the prestigious Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship of the European Commission. She earned her PhD in 2006 from K.U. Leuven (Belgium).

Martijn de Jong

Martijn de Jong: “State-of-the-art Cross-Cultural Research Methods for Research in Management”
For this project, de Jong focuses on one of the most elusive and interdisciplinary response styles that has troubled social science researchers for decades, namely socially desirable responding (SDR).

De Jong: “In order to test theories in an international setting, researchers often have to rely on surveys. However, if scores on measurement instruments are to be compared across countries, valid comparisons require that the instruments measure the same construct in each population and that the relationship between scale scores and scores on the construct be invariant across populations”. For his project, de Jong builds on recently developed item randomized response models and will examine this technique across 17 countries in 4 continents. De Jong will apply the method to study reporting of risky sexual behavior in the context of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV.

Martijn de Jong, associate professor of Marketing at RSM Erasmus University, studied Econometrics at Erasmus University. In 2002 he started his PhD research at Tilburg University. He obtained his PhD in October 2006 cum laude (dissertation title: Response Bias in International Marketing Research – for which he obtained a prestigious dissertation prize at Tilburg University in 2007). Martijn de Jong is also recipient of the EUR Fellowship. In March, de Jong received the J.C. Ruigrok Prize.

Ralf van der Lans

Ralf van der Lans: “Design Optimization through Eye-Movement Analysis”
Product design is an important determinant of consumer choice and marketplace success. As a consequence retailers and manufacturers invest heavily in point of purchase marketing in stores as well as on the internet. Academic research extensively studied consumer reactions to design, because of its practical and theoretical importance. However, an essential limitation of this body of research is that it focuses in large part on verbalized responses, while unconscious processes, not reflected in verbalized responses, are an important determinant of consumer reactions to design. As a consequence, academic research still provides little guidance on how visual design affects choice and how to optimally design a choice alternative within a given choice context.

Van der Lans: “For this project, I propose a model that is expected to be an important tool for practitioners to optimally design packages and in-store communication, as well as for policy makers, who may use this tool to help consumers making better choices. This model, a newly developed neurologically plausible Bayesian statistical model, will be based on theories in experimental aesthetics, decision making and visual attention, and analyzes the eye-movements of consumers at the point of purchase.”

Ralf van der Lans is associate professor of Marketing at RSM Erasmus University. He received his PhD, cum laude, in marketing from Tilburg University in 2006. His main research interests are in developing new statistical models for eye tracking and online marketing to better understand consumer behavior. In 2007, Ralf won the SAP-PIM Marketing Science Prize for his dissertation. He also won the ERIM award for outstanding performance by a young researcher 2007. His research appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association and Marketing Science.

More Information
Homepage NWO VENI
Personal Homepage Aurélie Lemmens
<link people martijn-de-jong _blank>Personal Homepage Martijn de Jong
<link people ralf-van-der-lans-erim-member-2005-july-2010 _blank>Personal Homepage Ralf van der Lans

Sunday, 1 November 2009