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害的影响。这在正规保险和国家能力有限的低收入环境中变得至关重要。在自然灾害发生后，如何鼓励和维持社区内部的资源共享，成为减轻灾害影响的一个重要问题。本研究采用社区层面的方法来解决这个问题，评估了对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。这种方法强调了工程社会关系的思想，以实现对关键环境问题的成本效益解决方案。研究人员在地下水中自然存在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仍有大量人口饮用含砷量高的井水。在印度1000多万口私人水井中，约有三分之一砷含量高。自上而下的解决方案——通常是更深的公共水井或管道供水——远不是普遍可行的。污染程度往往因户而异。这种特殊的特征表明，即使在污染最严重的地区，也有相当数量的安全井可以共享。事实上，几项研究表明，拥有安全井的一些家庭（但不是所有家庭）会与邻居共用水井。该项目研究如何通过使现有的分享者的积极社会形象更加突出来进一步扩大分享。具体而言，本项目调查社会形象补偿是否可以维持私人提供安全饮用水。通过集群随机对照实验确定社会奖励的治疗效果。本研究探讨了社会激励在多大程度上可以扩大合作的问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.