Dissertation Title: Essays on Economic and Prosocial Behavior

My dissertation addresses the relationship between economic exchange and the social psychology of prosocial behavior, with each chapter using different quantitative, computational, and mathematical tools to understand this relationship. In my first chapter, I analyze egocentric network data collected from 75 villages in Karnataka, a state in southern India, to assess the relationship between bank account ownership and patterns of reported social relations across caste boundaries. In my second chapter, I have designed a social exchange experiment to test how different forms of dyadic exchange affect prosocial behavior towards a third party. In my third chapter, I derive closed-form solutions from a mathematical model of other-regarding preferences and show how structural properties of the distribution of concern in a group lead to sociologically interesting equilibrium distributions of concern, and how this can transform social dilemmas into situations that afford cooperation, and vice-versa.