Julia Shvets

Julia Shvets is a College Associate Professor of Economics at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, where she also serves as Director of Studies in Economics. She is a microeconomist specializing in behavioral economics, focusing on understanding the hidden forces that shape human decision-making in organizational contexts.

Her research spans several interconnected areas including overconfidence, rank incentives, and decision-making processes. She investigates how people form beliefs about themselves and others, how these beliefs affect performance, and what drives behavior when people are ranked against peers. Her work combines field data from real-world settings with experimental approaches to bridge the gap between laboratory findings and practical applications.

Dr. Shvets has developed significant insights through collaborations with organizations including a major food chain where she studied managerial behavior. Her research on overconfidence revealed how managers maintain overly optimistic self-assessments despite having access to accurate performance data, and how this relates to memory distortion. Her work on rank incentives demonstrates that people care about their relative standing beyond just the financial implications.

She has been featured in prominent media outlets including Freakonomics podcast, Hear this Idea, and The Visible Hand, where she discusses the practical implications of behavioral economics for everyday decision-making. Her teaching spans Microeconomics, Political Economics, Economic Theory, Public Economics, and Industrial Organization at institutions including Cambridge, London School of Economics, and ICEF in Moscow.