People's Trust: The Design of a Survey-based Experiment

John Ermisch and Diego Gambetta ()
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Diego Gambetta: University of Oxford

No 2216, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we present the design of a two-stage experiment which aims to measure trusting and trustworthiness in a representative sample of the British population. In the first part we discuss the shortcomings of the most common design of the ‘trust-game’ experiment in eliciting information about clear and cogent notions of trusting and trustworthiness, and in the second part we present an alternative design, which we call the ‘framed binary trust game’. The basic design will be administered to a sample of 200 subjects who were formerly members of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). In the third part of the paper, we extend this design to allow the ‘truster’ to purchase some information about the ‘trustee’ so as to make the experiment a better representation of real-life trust decisions. We plan in a second stage to run the extended experiment on a larger sample of about 1000 subjects.

Keywords: field experiments; trust game; trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2006-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: People’s trust: the design of a survey-based experiment (2006)
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