Dr. Sarah Rezaei Khavas

Biography

Sarah Rezaei Khavas is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University specializing in Economics. Her research combines behavioral, experimental, and labor economics, focusing on how individuals make decisions within educational labor markets, especially in response to competition, incentives, social dynamics, and emerging technologies. She is particularly interested in behavioral biases, overconfidence, and motivated reasoning, and how these factors interact with institutional settings such as schools, workplaces, and digital platforms to shape outcomes and inequalities. Part of her work explores how individuals respond to performance pressure and uncertainty in decision-making, including how students set goals in competitive environments and how modest incentives can help recalibrate overly ambitious expectations, thereby improving motivation and performance. Her insights extend to the workplace, where she investigates how employers interact with algorithmic hiring tools and the moral and reputational concerns that come into play. Furthermore, her research demonstrates how social preferences and informal norms influence cooperation, particularly within networks, and underscores the significant impact of fairness concerns in social contexts on individual contributions toward collective goals in classrooms, organizations, and society at large. Overall, her work contributes to a deeper understanding of how institutions can be designed to account for human behavior—its biases, social embeddedness, and interactions with technology—to foster inclusive and effective education and labor market policies.

Research Interests