 Trust, Beliefs and Cooperation: Excavating a Foundation of Strong EconomiesJeongbin Kim, Louis Putterman and Xinyi Zhang European Economic Review, 2022, vol. 147, issue C Abstract: One reason trust is positively correlated with standard of living across societies may be that people treat trustworthiness in sequential social dilemmas as a sign that others will also cooperate in simultaneous collective action problems, and trust tends to correlate with trustworthiness. Trustworthiness and cooperation may both reflect the same disposition: reciprocity. Whether trust itself predicts cooperation is less clear, a priori. We conduct a laboratory experiment and find that subjects infer cooperativeness from trustworthiness and on average cooperate more when they predict others to be more cooperative. A novel result is that subjects make the same inferences from trusting as from trustworthiness. We find that subjects’ priors entail considerable heterogeneity of trustworthiness, trust and cooperation within the population. Finally, conditional cooperation explains contributions better than guilt aversion, in our data. Keywords: trust; cooperation; beliefs; reciprocity; economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:147:y:2022:i:c:s0014292122000940 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2022.104166 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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