Rate My Professor Ronald Peeters

Professor Ronald Peeters serves as Head of the Department of Economics within the Otago Business School at the University of Otago, having joined the institution in October 2017. Prior to this appointment, he held positions as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Maastricht University, where he completed his PhD in 2002, following the attainment of his BSc and MSc degrees from Radboud University Nijmegen. His academic career is centered on advancing understanding of coordination and cooperation towards socially desirable outcomes, including social norms, in dynamic settings of strategic interaction. Peeters employs a diverse methodological toolkit encompassing game theory—particularly dynamic and evolutionary games—learning models with bounded rationality, social networks, computational economics, laboratory experiments, and simulations. Specific research foci include the evolution of socially desirable behavior within social networks and the development of mechanisms to elicit and aggregate beliefs and expectations for predicting future events such as elections and sports outcomes. His expertise extends to strategic behavior in competition, auctions, voting, and fundraising through auctions and lotteries.

Peeters' preferred areas for research supervision are experimental economics concerning cooperation, ambiguity, altruism, and trust; behavioral mechanism design related to contests for enhancing charitable giving and market mechanisms; and game theory focused on strategic learning in social networks. His scholarly contributions are evidenced in numerous peer-reviewed publications. Key works include 'Time inconsistency and second-order beliefs over types in extensive-form games' (2025, Theory & Decision, with Flesch, Méder, and Sarafidis), 'Existence of pure equilibria in symmetric two-player zero-sum games' (2025, International Journal of Game Theory, with Ismail), 'An experimental analysis of contagion in financial markets' (2025, Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control, with Veiga and Vorsatz), 'Directed reciprocity subverts cooperation in highly adaptive populations' (2024, Scientific Reports, with Herings and Tenev), 'Stable cartel configurations and product differentiation: The case of multiple cartels' (2024, Mathematical Social Sciences, with Khan), 'Security auctions with cash- and equity-bids: An experimental study' (2024, with Bajoori and Wolk), 'Do markets encourage risk-seeking behaviour?' (2022, The European Journal of Finance, with Mengel), 'Small group forecasting using proportional-prize contests' (2022, with Rao), and 'Simple guilt and cooperation' (2021, Journal of Economic Psychology, with Vorsatz). With research interests in game theory, behavioral and experimental economics, and industrial organization, Peeters continues to shape discourse in these fields through his rigorous analytical and empirical approaches.