Put your money where your mouth is: Reciprocity, social preferences, trust and contributions to public goods (original) (raw)
2013, Rationality and Society
It is argued that trust and positive social preferences promote public goods production. However, public goods produced by any in-group may have favourable or unfavourable consequences for out-groups (called ‘benign’ and ‘malignant’ public goods, respectively). I develop a theoretical model of heterogeneous reciprocity preferences and report two experiments relating trust, social preferences and in-group bias to contributions to benign and malignant public goods. The results allow four general conclusions: (i) contributions to benign public goods are (weakly) higher than contributions to malignant ones; (ii) general trust is at best weakly related to contributions to both types of public goods; (iii) the expectation that others contribute is positively related to contributions to both types of public goods; and (iv) social preferences are positively related to contributions to benign public goods and unrelated to contributions to malignant public goods, while in-group bias is negati...
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