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Open defecation, which is linked to poor health outcomes and lower cognitive ability has been widespread in India. Improved sanitation practice generates local health externalities, which implies that the returns to private toilet usage…
Groups make decisions on both the production and the distribution of resources. These decisions typically involve a tension between increasing the total level of group resources (i.e. social efficiency) and distributing these resources…
Shared resources enhance productivity yet at the same time provide channels for biological and digital contamination, turning physical or digital hygiene into a cooperation dilemma prone to free-riding. Here we introduce a game of…
We study the distributional features and inequality of consumption expenditure across India, for different states, castes, religion and urban-rural divide. We find that even though the aggregate measures of inequality are fairly diversified…
Decision to participate in education depends on the circumstances individual inherits and on the returns to education she expects as well. If one person from any socio-economically disadvantaged social group inherits poor circumstances…
It has been argued that the reservation system in India, which has existed since the time of Indian Independence (1947), has caused more havoc and degradation than progress. This being a popular public opinion, has not been based on any…
Compliance with measures like social distancing, hand-washing and wearing masks have emerged as the dominant strategy to combat health risk from the COVID-19 pandemic. These behaviors are often argued to be pro-social, where one must incur…
We study the effectiveness of a community-level information intervention aimed at improving sanitation using a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Nigerian communities. The intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), is…
Racial residential segregation is a defining and enduring feature of U.S. society, shaping inter-group relations, racial disparities in income and health, and access to high-quality public goods and services. The design of policies aimed at…
Device use in smart homes is becoming increasingly communal, requiring cohabitants to navigate a complex social and technological context. In this paper, we report findings from an exploratory survey grounded in our prior work on communal…
Signalling social status through the consumption of visible goods has often been perceived as a way in which individuals seek to emulate or move up compared to others within the community. Using representative migration survey data from the…
Redistribution of resources within a group as a method to reduce wealth inequality is a current area of debate. The evolutionary path to or away from wealth sharing is also a subject of active research. In order to investigate effects and…
There is an increased appreciation for, and utilization of, social networks to disseminate various kinds of interventions in a target population. Homophily, the tendency of people to be similar to those they interact with, can create…
In this study, we make use of empirically observed occupational stratification patterns, in order to identify the relationship between education and social mobility of individuals - the latter is approximated by the social distance of an…
Energy-poor households often compromise their thermal comfort and refrain from operating mechanical cooling devices to avoid high electricity bills. This is compounded by certain behavioral practices like retention of older, less efficient…
Extracting from shared resources requires making choices to balance personal profit and sustainability. We present the results of a behavioural experiment wherein we manipulate the default extraction from a finite resource. Participants…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
Visualization research often focuses on perceptual accuracy or helping readers interpret key messages. However, we know very little about how chart designs might influence readers' perceptions of the people behind the data. Specifically,…
Discriminatory caste attitudes currently stigmatize millions of Indians, subjecting individuals to prejudice in all aspects of life. Governmental incentives and societal movements have attempted to counter these attitudes, yet accurate…
The relation between speed and density is connected with every self-organization phenomenon of pedestrian dynamics and offers the opportunity to analyze them quantitatively. But even for the simplest systems, like pedestrian streams in…