Microfoundations of Social Capital

Christian Thöni, Jean-Robert Tyran and Erik Wengström

No 09-24, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide a microfoundation for this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark and find that the trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others’ cooperation. To disentangle the preference and belief channels, we run a (standard) public goods game in which beliefs matter for cooperation choices and one (using the strategy method) in which they do not matter. We show that the “fairness question”, a recently proposed alternative to the “trust question”, is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.

Keywords: Social capital; Trust; Fairness; Public goods; Cooperation; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2009-10, Revised 2010-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Microfoundations of social capital (2012)
Working Paper: Microfoundations of Social Capital (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuiedp:0924

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