 Online markets and trustWenbo Zou, Jinjie Wang and Jubo Yan Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 201, issue C, 395-412 Abstract: Markets may shape trust and trustworthiness. In this paper, we first report results from a one-shot trust game conducted in a lab-in-the-field experiment with villagers in a rural county in northern China. Experimental results suggest that the experience as online market sellers improves individuals’ level of trustworthiness. To provide more rigorous causal evidence and insights on the underlying mechanisms, we then conducted a laboratory experiment, in which subjects played an infinitely repeated market game with asymmetric information; both before and after the market game, subjects made choices in a one-shot trust game. We do not find that the ex-post choices in the trust game differ between those playing the market game and those conducting a real-effort task instead, except that when the market game does not have a reputation system, buyers become less trustworthy afterward—adding a voluntary reputation system similar to the real-world online rating system help mitigate such a detrimental effect. Keywords: Markets and morality; Trust and trustworthiness; E-commerce; Reputation system; Endogenous preferences; Multiple sequential games (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:jeborg:v:201:y:2022:i:c:p:395-412 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.06.038 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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