Measuring Trust: A Reinvestigation

Billur Aksoy (), Haley Harwell (), Ada Kovaliukaite () and Catherine Eckel
Additional contact information
Billur Aksoy: Texas A&M University, Department of Economics
Haley Harwell: University of Richmond, Jepson School of Leadership Studies
Ada Kovaliukaite: Texas A&M University, Department of Economics

No 20170119-001, Working Papers from Texas A&M University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We reinvestigate the question first posed by Glaeser, Laibson, Scheinkman and Soutter (2000, GLSS hereafter): What is the best measure of trust for predicting trusting behavior? This important study, cited over 2,100 times, established that the behavior in the investment game, an incentivized measure of trust, is not correlated with the responses to the most widely used survey questions about trust, employed in the General Social Survey (GSS) and the World Values Survey (WVS). We use the GLSS protocol with one major change: we employ the original Berg et al. (1995) investment game instead of the modified version used in GLSS. The standard game endows both players, while the latter endows only the first mover, potentially changing the incentives that influence subjects’ behavior. In particular, the utility from trusting behavior for inequality averse individuals may be higher, if the second movers are not endowed. Thus, such players may appear to be more trusting even though they are simply inequality averse. This causes a distortion in the laboratory measure of trust and reduces its correlation with the survey measure of trust. In support of this concern, GLSS demonstrates that the survey measure of trust is not correlated with trusting behavior in their investment game, where the second mover is not endowed. After endowing the second mover, we find the opposite. Our finding suggests that trust is a single construct, whether measured by the survey questions or by an incentivized game. This can be masked if the incentivized measure of trust is confounded with other motives.

Keywords: Investment game; replication; lab experiment; trust; trustworthiness; inequality aversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2017-01-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-soc and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://pvsessions.tamu.edu/RePEc/aksoymeasuringtrust.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to pvsessions.tamu.edu:443 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring trust: A reinvestigation (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:txm:wpaper:20170119-001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Texas A&M University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pedro Bento ().