This dissertation explores what factors and institutions influence individual decision making and their economic impacts on the society, using approaches of laboratory and field experiments. The first essay addresses the effect of communication on cooperation. The second essay explores various types of public recognition, and their impacts on individual donation. The third essay studies how principals use their time in K-12 schools and the potential impact on student and school outcomes. The first essay employs a laboratory experiment including three factors in human interactions, a noisy environment, indefinite length of interactions, and various levels of communication, to study what factors make individuals more cooperative. Results show that subjects are less cooperative in a noisy environment, and communication via fixed messages is not a remedy for the low cooperation rate in this noisy environment. However, communication via free messages leads to more cooperations, and it maintains cooperation rate at a high level over time. The second essay is a joint work with Yefeng Chen, Haoran He, and Jun Luo. We conduct a field experiment to investigate how public recognition influences individual charitable giving. We design five treatments with distinct public recognition schemes and vary the timing when we offer opportunities of public recognition. Results show that both donation amount and participation rate are significantly higher when we mandate recognition. However, public recognition offered before donation crowds out small donations and thus lowers the participation rate. We claim that public recognition is a “double-edged sword” on individual charitable giving. The third essay is a joint work with Mary Mira. We conduct a principal motion study in Fulton County, Georgia and shadow 30 school principals from all levels of public K-12 schools for two work days. We link our observational data with student performance data from state-wide standard scores. Results show that principals’ time spend on building and maintaining school culture and school climate, as well as evaluating teachers and school staff are most positively related to student performance.

La question de la reconnaissance publique devient un important sujet de réflexion et de débat dans la France des Lumières. D’une part, plusieurs penseurs font de la gloire un processus affectif de reconnaissance du mérite susceptible d’ordonner une société harmonieuse et juste. D’autre part, le XVIIIe siècle voit l’émergence d’une culture de la célébrité qui favorise la multiplication des personnalités connues, en particulier issues du milieu des lettres et des arts de la capitale. Plutôt que de distinguer des individus dont le vrai mérite suscite l’admiration unanime, comme le voudrait l’économie de la gloire, la célébrité s’alimente, entre autres, de la controverse, du dévoilement de la vie privée et de la consommation du divertissement. Dès son avènement, elle est largement perçue comme un facteur de décadence morale et un symptôme d’appauvrissement culturel. Cette étude propose donc une incursion dans les discours moraux, esthétiques et biographiques qui ont participé à l’élaboration, à la promotion et à la critique d’économies de la reconnaissance publique. En analysant une sélection de textes publiés sur une période d’environ 150 ans, entre la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes et le premier tiers du XIXe siècle, je montre la cohérence de fond et les articulations de ces réflexions qui portent, en définitive, sur le genre d’ordre social que l’on voudrait consolider ou voir advenir. Elles ouvrent en retour une perspective sur la spécificité de ce moment charnière, marqué entre autres par la déstructuration des hiérarchies traditionnelles et l’affirmation de l’individu comme sujet moral autonome / Reflections and debates on the issue of public recognition gained heightened significance in Enlightenment France. On the one hand, Enlightenment thinkers promoted glory as a way to foster progress and harmony through the collective recognition and emulation of true merit. On the other hand, the century saw the advent of a celebrity culture, which enabled the multiplication of famed individuals, especially emanating from the capital’s arts and literary circles. Instead of distinguishing individuals whose merit gave rise to unanimous admiration, as the economy of glory would demand, celebrity seemed to build more upon controversies, revelations about private lives, and the consumption of entertainment. From its inception, celebrity was perceived as a contributing factor to moral degeneracy and as a sign of cultural decadence. This dissertation examines moral, aesthetic, and biographical texts that contributed to the creation, promotion, and critique of the economies of public recognition. An analysis of these texts published over a 150-year period – from the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes to the first third of the nineteenth century – sheds light on their arguments with regards to the type of order that they hoped to consolidate or engender. These texts also offer a unique view into the particularities of this defining moment shaped by the erosion of traditional hierarchies and the advent of individuals as autonomous moral subjects

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