EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Distinguishing trust from risk: An anatomy of the investment game

Daniel Houser, Daniel Schunk and Joachim Winter ()

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2010, vol. 74, issue 1-2, 72-81

Abstract: The role of trust in promoting economic activity and societal development has received considerable academic attention by social scientists. A popular way to measure trust at the individual level is the so-called "investment game" (Berg et al., 1995). It has been widely noted, however, that risk attitudes can also affect decisions in this game, and thus in principle confound inferences about trust. We provide novel evidence shedding light on the role of risk attitudes for trusting decisions. To the best of our knowledge our data are the first rigorous evidence that (i) aggregate investment distributions differ significantly between trust and risk environments, and (ii) risk attitudes predict individual investment decisions in risk games but not in the corresponding trust games. Our results are convergent evidence that trust decisions are not tightly connected to a person's risk attitudes, and they lend support to the "trust" interpretation of decisions in investment games.

Keywords: Investment; game; Trust; game; Risk; attitude; Measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (118)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-2681(10)00005-3
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Distinguishing trust from risk: An anatomy of the investment game (2010)
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:eee:jeborg:v:74:y:2010:i:1-2:p:72-81

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
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:74:y:2010:i:1-2:p:72-81