Room S4, Maison de la paix, Geneva
The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.
As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Amrita Dhillon, Professor of Economics in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London.
She will present her work titled Information, Beliefs and Citizen Activism: An Experiment, joint with Farzana Afridi, Ahana Basistha and Danila Serra
Abstract: Citizens’ effective participation in anti-corruption activism faces informational constraints and collective action problems. We conduct an online survey experiment in India to test how increasing awareness about corrupt practices in the health sector and correcting misaligned beliefs about others’ willingness to fight corruption affect individuals’ activism. In one treatment, we expose subjects to a short video, aimed at providing information on how corruption and fraud took place in hospitals in India during the pandemic. In another treatment, we correct individuals’ misaligned beliefs about others’ willingness to stand up against health sector corruption. In a third treatment, we combine the video and the belief correction interventions. We assess individuals’ willingness to engage in anti-corruption actions that differ in their expected costs and benefits, and the extent to which they are subject to collective action problems. In particular, we experimentally manipulate whether subjects are given the chance to: 1) sign a petition to the Ministry of Health, 2) make a monetary donation to a local non-profit organization, 3) watch a 5-minute informational video on how to concretely fight corruption in health, or 4) choose among the three anti-corruption actions.
Amrita Dhillon is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Political Economy. She is also research group leader for Quantitative Political Economy. She graduated from SUNY Stony Brook with a PhD in 1994. Her training is in theoretical modelling including political economy, public economics, game theory and development. Her main field of research is political economy. Amrita's research interests span a variety of applications of political economy from voting games where she studied issues of voter turnout and strategic voting, formation of political parties, protest movements to sovereign debt and politics where she studies how leader reputation can change default outcomes in democracies vs autocracies.