This dissertation examines the roles of social incentives in economic decision-making. The first chapter analyzes the impact of (partially) revealing social identity on the behavior of individuals online. The second chapter studies an experiment that targeted leveraging social incentives and social relations to facilitate informal risk-sharing. The last chapter studies the role of social networks in propagating preventive health behaviors, beliefs, and knowledge. In the first chapter, I study if reducing user anonymity and partially revealing a user's social identity could affect communication on social media. In a motivating signaling framework, I find revealing group-level identity discourages marginalized groups' participation and exacerbates ideological segregation. I test the predictions by leveraging a recent IP location disclosure policy imposed by the Chinese government on mainstream Chinese social media platforms. Empirical findings are consistent with the model predictions using recent text analysis technology advancements. Benchmark analysis through a regression discontinuity in time framework suggests that revealing the user's IP-based geographic location reduced the participation of non-mainland users substantially by nearly 30% one month after the policy implementation. Delving into the mechanism, the policy amplifies geographic-based sorting, possibly leading to ideological segregation. These findings highlight the negative impact of revealing social identity by hurdling intergroup information transmission and intensifying the echo chamber. The second chapter (co-authored with Prabhat Barnwal and Lex van Geen) studies whether policymakers could engineer the informal risk-sharing between households to mitigate the idiosyncratic risks during shocks. We design a novel experiment to study how ex-ante commitments improve risk-sharing in the context of groundwater arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh. In a field experiment conducted across 135 village communities in rural Bangladesh, we evaluate the impact of facilitating ex-ante commitments between household pairs to share safe water. On top of the commitment facilitation, we design a two-part randomized trial that first notifies and then implements peer monitoring of these commitments before and after testing the arsenic. Well-owners from communities with facilitated commitments reduce arsenic intake by 8.7%, while the effect spillover to non-well-owners by 16.7\%. On the other hand, notifying peer monitoring increases the level of sorting in risk-sharing formation, and implementing peer monitoring eventually hinders risk-sharing facilitated by ex-ante commitment. Our mixed findings imply the complexity of leveraging social incentives and relations to design community-driven programs. In the last chapter (also co-authored with Prabhat Barnwal and Lex van Geen), we study how societal interactions influence the adoption of preventive health measures. We document three main findings using social networks and geo-location data collected in in-person and phone surveys from 135 villages in rural Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, our results suggest that socially connected and geographically nearby households induce households' adoption of preventive health measures. Second, such peer effects only exist for preventive measures that can be publicly observed. Third, these peer effects tend to disappear when social and geographic distance between households increases. Our findings suggest that the social incentives underlying decisions to adopt preventive health measures are important.These three chapters highlight my main goal to bridge the recent theoretical studies in the economics of social incentives to novel solutions to real-world problems. I show that social incentives exist, substantially matter for people's decision-making, and, most importantly, could be cleverly engineered to improve the welfare of people in underdeveloped areas. The importance of pursuing further study in this area is threefold. First, social incentives can be correctly engineered to become powerful economic policy tools. Second, while social incentives may matter for all the perceivable economic decisions, our knowledge of predicting to individual and group behavior is still quite limited. Last of all, a deeper study in this area could possibly reshape our understanding of how efficient and economical behavior can be encouraged/distorted by social concerns.
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