Social Influence in Trustors' Neighborhoods

Luigi Luini (), Annamaria Nese () and Patrizia Sbriglia

Labsi Experimental Economics Laboratory University of Siena from University of Siena

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to ascertain whether trust is affected by contagion and herding in small groups of trustors who can observe each other’s choices over time. We account for three important factors of trustors’preferences, namely: risk attitude, generosity and expected trustworthiness. Using our data, we test the basic hypothesis that an individual's propensity to trust recipients in the Trust Game may be affected by the observed behavior of other trustors. Our results confirm that trust is affected by contagion effects. Furthermore, we find that specific types of agents (generous or untrusting) frequently imitate the same type when placed in the same group. Finally, we find that untrusting individuals are less affected by their peers compared to generous individuals, and that they are less prone to imitation when placed in groups of agents who have the same characteristics.

Keywords: trust game; experiments; social influence; imitation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.labsi.org/wp/labsi40.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social influence in trustors’ neighbourhoods (2014)
Working Paper: Social Influence in Trustors’ Neighborhoods (2011)
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:usi:labsit:040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Labsi Experimental Economics Laboratory University of Siena from University of Siena Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessandro Innocenti ().