Interdependent individuals: How aggregation, observation, and persuasion affect economic behavior and judgment

Individuals are influenced by the social environment and social interactions they engage in. This dissertation contains an introductory chapter and three chapters all concerning the interdependence of individuals. It explores how observation, aggregation, and persuasion affect judgment and economic decision making. All of the three chapters combine behavioral insights with experimental methods. Through a collective-choice rule, groups can aggregate individual preferences into a collective decision. Chapter 2 explores the role of collective-choice rules in self-governance in a public goods game, and shows that collective-choice rules affect cooperation directly and indirectly. By observing what others do, people extract information from the environment. Chapter 3 demonstrates that observing a reference action suffices to affect moral judgments. Chapter 4 studies how people deal with information slant and studies the persistent effect of persuasion on judgments and decisions