Culture and Action Network

My dissertation addresses the relationship between economic exchange and the social psychology of prosocial behavior, with each chapter using different quantitative, computational, and mathematical tools to understand this relationship. In my first chapter, I analyze egocentric network data collected from 75 villages in Karnataka, a state in southern India, to assess the relationship between bank account ownership and patterns of reported social relations across caste boundaries. In my second chapter, I derive closed-form solutions from a mathematical model of other-regarding preferences and show how structural properties of the distribution of concern in a group lead to sociologically interesting equilibrium distributions of concern, and how this can transform social dilemmas into situations that afford cooperation, and vice-versa.