UC Berkeley

This dissertation studies how information, institutions, and social preferences shape collective responses to public problems. Across three empirical settings, the chapters examine why individuals and communities do or do not act on information that is socially valuable: information about environmental harm, public infrastructure quality, and public-health risks. The chapters share a common concern with the political and social conditions under which information changes behavior. Information may fail to travel when local leaders have incentives to suppress it, may be strategically distorted by political actors before reaching voters, or may be filtered through durable cultural norms and individual preferences. Together, the dissertation shows that information is not merely a technical input into decision-making; its effects depend on who controls it, how it is delivered, and the social environment in which people interpret and act on it. Chapter 1 studies whether information can catalyze community collective action against environmental harms from artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Ghana. In many mining-affected communities, residents are exposed to severe long-term health risks but remain poorly informed about the connection between mining pollution and chronic conditions. I evaluate a cluster randomized intervention that delivered a documentary about these harms either privately to traditional chiefs or publicly to both chiefs and community members. The results show that private leader-mediated information raises chiefs’ knowledge but does not reliably generate community learning or collective action, especially when chiefs have conflicts of interest. Public dissemination, by contrast, increases community learning and engagement even when leaders are conflicted. However, translating information into regulatory consensus still depends on local leadership incentives. The chapter shows that information cannot reliably mobilize collective action even when delivery channels build broad-based awareness and create public accountability; collective action emerges only when leaders’ incentives are also aligned. Chapter 2 examines political manipulation of information disclosure in India’s rural road quality audit system. Public audits are intended to inform voters about the quality of government-provided infrastructure, but the chapter shows that state-level audits can themselves become tools of political economy. Using administrative data from Bihar’s rural road program around the 2015 state election, I compare quality reporting in constituencies aligned and not aligned with the state ruling party. The evidence is consistent with strategic manipulation: state audit reports become differentially favorable to aligned constituencies before elections, while national audits, which are more insulated from state political influence, do not display the same pattern. Additional evidence points to manipulation through auditor assignment and inspection timing. The chapter highlights a core tension in information-based accountability: disclosure systems can improve electoral accountability only when the institutions producing information are themselves protected from political capture. Chapter 3 asks whether culture and individual preferences travel with people and predict public-health behavior in a shared environment. Using an original survey of international students at UC Berkeley during the early COVID-19 pandemic, I study precautionary behaviors among students from different origin countries who faced a common university and local policy context. The chapter links individual-level measures of preferences, including individualism, risk-taking, reciprocity, and patience, to precautionary behavior, while also matching respondents to origin-country cultural norms. The results show that both respondent-level preferences and origin-country norms predict precautionary behavior. More individualistic and risk-tolerant respondents report less precaution, while more positively reciprocal and patient respondents report more. Origin-country norms also retain predictive power after accounting for matched individual preferences, suggesting that cultural background may matter through broader channels than measured individual traits alone. The chapter contributes to understanding how social preferences and cultural environments shape behavior during collective-risk crises.