The purpose of this thesis was to simultaneously test a new theoretical model,
vicarious hypocrisy, which has been shown to produce changes in people’s
sunblock usage attitudes and behavior, and to apply this model to another
important health domain, dental…

Network-based modeling of complex systems with emergent behavior is increasingly being employed across different disciplines. Much of the focus in such efforts has been on detailed, "microscopic" modeling, in which the dynamics is described in terms of the individual nodes…

Despite earlier evidence to the contrary, recent inquiries appear to reach a consensus that the poor
pay more for food. However, these studies utilize samples drawn on the basis of prior
knowledge of unfair pricing strategies, proximity of volunteer surveyors,…

To investigate the influence of input from fellow group members in a constrained decision-making context, we develop four 2-armed bandit tasks in which subjects freely select one of two options (A or B) and are informed of the resulting reward…

This dissertation concerns itself with the effects of education and wealth on health in Africa. The first two chapters focus on the impact of adult education levels on the HIV epidemic in four sub-Saharan countries. The last chapter turns to…

The limitations common to linear imaging techniques were formalized succinctly by Ernst Abbe in 1873. In his theory, each Fourier component of a signal propagates independently from the source to the detector, and the corresponding feature can be detected only…

This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to…

The central goal of compressed sensing is to capture attributes of a signal using very few measurements. The initial publications by Donoho and by Candes and Tao have been followed by applications to image compression, data streaming, medical signal processing,…