EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Trust and the Reference Points for Trustworthiness in Gulf and Western Countries

Iris Bohnet, Benedikt Herrmann and Richard Zeckhauser

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010, vol. 125, issue 2, 811-828

Abstract: Why is private investment so low in Gulf compared to Western countries? We investigate cross-regional differences in trust and reference points for trustworthiness as possible factors. Experiments controlling for cross-regional differences in institutions and beliefs about trustworthiness reveal that Gulf citizens pay much more than Westerners to avoid trusting, and hardly respond when returns to trusting change. These differences can be explained by subjects' gain/loss utility relative to their region's reference point for trustworthiness. The relation-based production of trust in the Gulf induces higher levels of trustworthiness, albeit within groups, than the rule-based interactions prevalent in the West.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (62)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.2.811 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Trust and the Reference Points for Trustworthiness in Gulf and Western Countries (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: Trust and the Reference Point for Trustworthiness in Gulf and Western Countries (2009) Downloads
Working Paper: Trust and the Reference Points for Trustworthiness in Gulf and Western Countries (2009) Downloads
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:oup:qjecon:v:125:y:2010:i:2:p:811-828.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:125:y:2010:i:2:p:811-828.