Put your money where your mouth is: Reciprocity, social preferences, trust and contributions to public goods

Jacob Dijkstra

Rationality and Society, 2013, vol. 25, issue 3, 290-334

Abstract: It is argued that trust and positive social preferences promote public goods production. However, public goods produced by any in-group may have favourable or unfavourable consequences for out-groups (called ‘benign’ and ‘malignant’ public goods, respectively). I develop a theoretical model of heterogeneous reciprocity preferences and report two experiments relating trust, social preferences and in-group bias to contributions to benign and malignant public goods. The results allow four general conclusions: (i) contributions to benign public goods are (weakly) higher than contributions to malignant ones; (ii) general trust is at best weakly related to contributions to both types of public goods; (iii) the expectation that others contribute is positively related to contributions to both types of public goods; and (iv) social preferences are positively related to contributions to benign public goods and unrelated to contributions to malignant public goods, while in-group bias is negatively related to contributions to both public goods.

Keywords: In-group bias; public goods; reciprocity; social preferences; trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:25:y:2013:i:3:p:290-334

DOI: 10.1177/1043463113492305

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