Does the trust game measure trust? (original) (raw)
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Verified Trust: Reciprocity, Altruism, and Randomness in Trust Games
University of Lausanne Ecole des HEC …, 2005
Behavioral economists have come to recognize that reciprocity, the interaction of trust and trustworthiness, is a distinct and economically relevant component of individual preferences alongside selfishness and altruism. This recognition is principally due to observed decisions in laboratory “trust games”. However, recent research suggests that altruism may explain much of what “looks like” trust in such experiments. We formally derive discriminatory tests for altruism and trust based on within-treatment and within-subject comparisons, and we control for group attributes of experimental subjects. The central idea is to allow for rich and poor trustees, and to examine whether, consistent with dominant altruism, trustors give more to the poor, or whether, consistent with dominant reciprocity motives, trustors give no more to the poor than to the rich. Our results support trust as the dominant motivation for “trust like” decisions, with at most a subsidiary role for altruism.
Verified Trust: Reciprocity, Altruism and Noise in Trust Games
2004
Behavioral economists have come to recognize that reciprocity, the interaction of trust and trustworthiness, is a distinct and economically relevant component of individual preferences alongside selfishness and altruism. This recognition is principally due to observed decisions in experimental "trust games". However, recent research has cast doubt on the explanatory power of trust as a determinant of those decisions, suggesting that altruism may explain much of what "looks like" trust. Moreover, empirical tests for alternative behavioral determinants can be sensitive to experimental bias due to differences in protocols and framing. Therefore, we propose discriminatory tests for altruism and trust that can be based on within-treatment and within-subject comparisons, and we control for group attributes of experimental subjects. Our results support trust (i.e. expected reciprocation) as the dominant motivation for "trust like" decisions.
Does Trust Mean Giving and not Risking? Experimental Evidence from the Trust Game
Revue d'économie politique, 2015
In a within-subjects framework, we compare levels of transfer in the trust game and in the (triple) dictator game. We control preferences towards risk through the Holt and Laury test (2002) and social preferences with the ring test (Liebrand, 1984). We then provide evidence that social preferences correlate with levels of transfer, while risk attitudes do not. Finally, we also cast doubts on the predictive power of the two tests.
Inequity aversion and trustees' reciprocity in the trust game
European Journal of Political Economy, 2007
The introduction of inequity concerns into the Trust Game gives rise to complementary concepts of conditional trustworthiness and unconditional untrustworthiness. When the inequity concern is not accounted for, unconditional untrustworthiness is overestimated. The high proportion of trustees adopting the equal division behavioural norm suggests that an unequal distribution of show-up fees may deter trustors from placing trust, and may eventually reduce the incentive to cooperate for both players. It also follows that increases in income inequality can explain declines in self-reported trust in high-income countries.
European Journal of Social Psychology, 2004
Three types of trusting have been distinguished conceptually and empirically. In cooperative trusting the trust giver explicitly expects a reaction from the trust recipient that fits with the equality norm. In pure trusting, no explicit expectation is expressed by the giver. In selfish trusting the giver explicitly expects a reaction that benefits himself or herself at the expense of the recipient. We asked whether the three types of trust elicit distinctive reactions from trust recipients. Each participant was paired with a fictitious player who ostensibly enabled him or her to divide money between them. As hypothesized, both cooperative and pure trusting elicited more equal allocations than did selfish trusting. A second hypothesis, that cooperative trust would yield more equal allocations than pure trust, was not supported. Results are discussed in terms of equality norm, self-interest norm, reciprocity norm, reactance theory, social sanctioning, and the need to comply with others' expectations.
2021
We study behavior in a trust game where first-movers initially have a higher endowment than second-movers but the occurrence of a positive random shock can eliminate this inequality by increasing the endowment of the second-mover before the decision of the first-mover. We find that second-movers return less (i.e., they are less trustworthy) when they have a lower endowment than first-movers, compared with the case in which first and second-movers have the same endowment. Second-movers who received the positive shock return more than those who did not; in fact, secondmovers who received the positive shock return more than second-movers who had the same endowment as the first-mover from the outset. First-movers do not seem to anticipate this behavior from second-movers. They send less to second-movers who benefited from a shock. These findings suggest that in addition to the distribution of the endowments the source of this distribution plays an important role in determining the levels of trust and trustworthiness. This, in turn, implies that current models of inequality aversion should be extended to accommodate for reference points if random positive shocks are possible in the trust game.
Intermediaries in Trust: An Experimental Study on Incentives and Norms
Trust situations involve a certain amount of risk for trustors that trustees can abuse. Knowing this, rational individuals might not place trust in others. In many real situations, intermediaries exist that play a crucial role helping trustors and trustees to cooperate. The question is how intermediaries can be motivated to accomplish this important task. We have investigated this by performing various experimental tests on a modified version of the investment game, where we introduced intermediaries who rated the behavior of trustees for the benefit of trustors. We manipulated incentive schemes and tested various role structures. We found that intrinsic motivations can increase the positive impact of the intermediaries on cooperation between trustors and trustees, even more than any material incentive, provided that there is room for indirect reciprocity strategies. Our results show the importance of intrinsic motivations of individuals and circumscribe the power and generalizability of material incentives for cooperation.
Altruism and Gender in the Trust Game
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper analyses gender differences in the trust game. Our experiment implements the triadic design proposed by to discriminate between transfers resulting from trust or trustworthiness and transfers resulting from altruistic preferences. We observe that women exhibit a higher degree of altruism than men for both trust and trustworthiness but relatively more for trustworthiness. This result provides an explanation to the experimental finding that women reciprocate more than men. JEL classification: C90; C91; D64; J16
It takes two to cheat: An experiment on derived trust
European Economic Review, 2013
Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust decisions involve multiple agents. Of particular interest is the case when a breach of trust is not profitable if carried out in isolation, but requires an agreement among agents. In such situations the pattern of behaviors is richer than in dyadic games, because even opportunistic trustees who would breach trust when alone may act trustworthily based on what they believe to be the predominant course of action. Anticipating this, trusters may be more inclined to trust. We dub these motivations derived trustworthiness and derived trust. To capture them, we design a "Collective Trust Game" and study it by means of a laboratory experiment. We report that overall levels of trustworthiness are almost thirty percentage points higher when derived motivations are present, and this generates also higher levels of trust. In our set-up, the effects of derived trustworthiness are comparable in size to positive reciprocity, and more important than concerns for equality.
The Trust Game Does Not (Only) Measure Trust: The Risk-Trust Confound Revisited
," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2019
The trust game has become the behavioral measure of choice in social science investigations of trust. This measure is often used uncritically to compare levels of trust across people and cultures even though those levels may be affected by people's attitudes to risk. We evaluate an incentive-compatible experiment designed to investigate the potential for a risk-trust confound using a sample of 202 students at the University of Cape Town in 2016. We depart from the earlier risk-trust literature by using a risk preference task that incorporates a wide range of prizes and probabilities. This allows us to investigate whether earlier ambiguous results concerning risk-trust interactions simply reflect weak measurement instruments, and facilitates the estimation of structural econometric risk preference models. We find that amounts sent in the trust game are indeed associated with attitudes to risk, that the magnitude of this relationship is economically significant, and that it is robust across statistical models. In addition, we find that most previous studies of the risk-trust confound use preference elicitation mechanisms that are underpowered for identifying risk-trust relationships. Our results caution against the widespread use of the trust game to measure and compare levels of trust without careful adjustments for risk attitudes.