Doctoral Dissertation Research: DRMS: Social Signaling and Health Risk Mitigation

社区可以通过共享资源来减轻环境灾难的影响。在正式保险和国家能力有限的低收入环境中，这变得至关重要。在社区面临自然灾害后，如何鼓励和维持社区内的资源共享成为减轻灾害影响的重要问题。这项研究使用社区层面的方法来解决这个问题，评估了对那些与其他社区成员共享资源的家庭进行社会奖励是否可以激励其他家庭也共享资源。这种方法突出了设计社会关系以实现关键环境问题的成本效益解决方案的想法。研究人员在地下水中自然产生的砷污染的背景下研究了这个问题。砷对成人和儿童健康的不利影响是众所周知的。然而，包括美国在内的世界各地有相当大的人口正在饮用高砷井中的水。在这个国家，1000多万口私人水井中约有三分之一的砷含量很高。自上而下的解决方案--通常是更深的公共水井或自来水供应--远不是普遍可用的。污染程度往往因户而异。这一特殊特征表明，即使在污染最严重的地区，也有相当数量的安全井可以潜在地共享。事实上，几项研究表明，拥有安全油井的一些家庭(但不是所有家庭)与邻居分享他们的油井。该项目研究了通过使现有共享者的积极社会形象更加突出来进一步扩大分享的方法。具体地说，该项目调查社会形象补偿是否能够维持私人提供安全饮用水。通过整群随机对照实验确定社会奖励的治疗效果。这项研究探讨了社会激励可以扩大合作的范围的问题。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Communities can mitigate the impact of environmental disasters by sharing resources. This becomes critical in low-income settings where formal insurance and state capacity are limited. How to encourage and sustain resource sharing within communities after they have faced a natural disaster becomes an important question for mitigating the disaster’s impact. Using a community-level approach to the problem, this study evaluates whether socially rewarding the households -- who have shared their resources with other community members -- can motivate other households to share resources as well. This approach highlights the idea of engineering social relationships to achieve a cost-effective solution to the critical environmental problem. The researchers study this question in the context of naturally occurring arsenic contamination in groundwater. Arsenic's adverse impact on adults' and children's health is well established. Yet a significant population across the world, including in the USA, is drinking from wells with high arsenic. About a third of more than 10 million private wells have high arsenic in the country. The top-down solution – usually deeper public wells or piped-water supply – is far from universally available. The level of contamination often varies from household to household. This idiosyncratic feature suggests that even in the most severely contaminated regions, there are a decent number of safe wells that can be potentially shared. Indeed, several studies have shown that some but not all households who own safe wells share their wells with their neighbors. The project studies ways to extend the sharing further by making the positive social images of the existing sharers more salient. Specifically, this project investigates whether social-image compensation can sustain the private provision of safe drinking water. The treatment effect of the social reward is identified through a cluster-randomized controlled experiment. The study explores the question of the extent social incentives can extend cooperation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.