Reputation, volunteering, and trust: Minimizing reliance on taste-based explanations

Joel M. Guttman and Lorenz Goette

European Journal of Political Economy, 2015, vol. 40, issue PB, 375-386

Abstract: We develop a model of public good contributions as signals of the contributor's trustworthiness, and test the predictions of this model using data on volunteering in small Swiss towns. Unlike most previous work, we avoid assuming that agents simply have a taste for prestige, and instead model the material value of a prosocial reputation. The model predicts that, specifically in small communities with low population turnover where reputation is important, volunteering will decline with age (as the end of the agent's reputational game approaches). In communities with higher turnover, this effect will not be observed. Our results support this hypothesis. The model also implies that the presence of a public good which must be provided voluntarily enhances trust in bilateral market and non-market interactions.

Keywords: Volunteering; Public goods provision; Reputation; Social capital; Prosocial behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268015000877
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:poleco:v:40:y:2015:i:pb:p:375-386

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2015.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().