Anna Shcherbiak

I am Anna Shcherbiak, a PhD candidate in Behavioral Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). I am supervised by Susann Fiedler.

My research is about what defines people - their core beliefs, their values, the norms they hold and the ones they only perform. More specifically, I am interested in what happens when personal norms and social norms come into conflict:

• Why do people vote for policies that hurt them or their own group?
• Under what conditions can someone hold a personal conviction steady against social pressure? When do they give in?
• What tips a private belief over the threshold into becoming a shared social norm?

I study these questions using laboratory and online experiments, and I am increasingly keen to bring this work into the field and to use classical causal inference methods from economics.

I am also the founder of the Vienna Behavioral Circle, a seminar series for behavioral researchers in Vienna.

Before starting my PhD, I worked at the National Bank of Ukraine, the National Anti-Corruption Agency of Ukraine, and at a boutique consultancy firm (Brady Intel) in Chicago.