The Cost of Risk Aversion: Eliciting risk preferences and re-evaluating flood protection standards in the Netherlands

Where water flows, prosperity follows.<br/><br/>Many prosperous areas around the world are situated near large bodies of water such as oceans, seas, and rivers. These bodies of water play a vital role in enhancing the prosperity of societies through various means. They provide convenient access to transportation, food, recreation, and many other...

Families versus Machines: On how a startup can improve digital well-being in the family life

The goal of this project was to find a way to improve digital well-being in family life through design for the startup Unpluq. In this thesis, the designer combined a design approach called Value Sensitive Design with the list of requirements methodology taught at Industrial Design Engineering. This resulted in a new methodology that allowed the...

Using Mechanical System Dynamics toModel Time-Discounting in Behavioural Economics

Time-discounting in behavioural economics is modelled using mechanical system dynamics through the economic engineering framework. The economic engineering framework is being developed at the Delft Center for Systems and Control, and uses mechanical system dynamics to model economic processes and systems. Time-discounting is the calculation of...

Design of a multidimensional digital system to enhance self-management in cardiovascular risk prevention programs

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death worldwide. While metabolic factors such as age and gender affect greatly, most of the CV events can be prevented by addressing behavioural risk factors such as physical inactivity, smoking or bad diet.<br/><br/>CV prevention programs aim to reduce the burden of these conditions by...

Rational Override; influencing behaviour beyond nudging: A service design approach towards creating behavioural interventions

Service organizations are struggling to understand and change behaviour since it is complex, dynamic, multidimensional and very often not considered to be rational. Human behaviour is a key component in services, as the interaction between a user and touchpoints determines the overall performance and value. Increasingly, service organizations...

Exploring policy impacts for servicising in product-based markets: A generic agent-based model

The shift to markets based on servicising, i.e. market-level transitions from product-based to service-based production and consumption patterns, may contribute to achieve absolute decoupling, i.e. the combined development of economic growth and environmental impact reduction. However, the potential of this contribution is largely unknown. In...

Developing a Generic Agent-Based Model to Explore Servicising Policy

Continuous economic growth, ignoring the incidental recession, is currently still coupled with increases in the use of resources and generation of wastes. The European Commission (EC) is looking for ways to achieve absolute decoupling between economic growth and environmental impacts. A shift from product-based to function-based production and...

A Generic Agent-Based Model to Explore Servicising Shifts

This paper describes a simulation model for informing policies towards absolute decoupling, with a focus on the possible contribution of servicising, i.e. a shift from product-based to service-based production and consumption patterns. The model is agent-based and represents a generic artificial market that revolves around a central consumption...