The prolonged wait!

“I neither had certainty about doing a PhD nor was I passionate about any specific topic of research when I started my academic journey. My professors in the university, who were stalwarts in the field of economics, motivated me in that direction and it was under one of these professors that I had a word about doing a PhD.

I had many rounds of discussions and deliberation before landing on a final topic for my PhD which revolved around behavioral economics. My work focused on understanding how communities manage natural resources and how their self-interest plays a role in this context. I studied the evolution of trust and cooperation by incorporating many psychological and socio-psychological concepts in the backdrop of resource management by communities. Since common people, particularly from rural areas, formed a major part of my field experiments, I had to commute quite often to these areas which often proved taxing. I was however intrigued to work in this area because money acted as a big driving factor for people to participate in my experiments only in the initial phases. As time progressed, people stopped contributing to community goods since nobody monitored them and there weren’t any punishments associated. This free-riding behavior is not rare in real-life scenarios as well and is more commonly exhibited in urban areas where people live independently.