Verified Trust: Reciprocity, Altruism, and Noise in Trust Games

Marius Brülhart and Jean-Claude Usunier

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: Behavioral economists have come to recognize that reciprocity, the interaction of trust and trustworthiness, is a distinct and economically relevant component of individual preferences alongside selfishness and altruism. This recognition is principally due to observed decisions in experimental "trust games". However, recent research has cast doubt on the explanatory power of trust as a determinant of those decisions, suggesting that altruism may explain much of what "looks like" trust. Moreover, empirical tests for alternative behavioral determinants can be sensitive to experimental bias due to differences in protocols and framing. Therefore, we propose discriminatory tests for altruism and trust that can be based on within-treatment and within-subject comparisons, and we control for group attributes of experimental subjects. Our results support trust (i.e. expected reciprocation) as the dominant motivation for "trust like" decisions.

Keywords: reciprocity; altruism; trust game; experimental error (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D63 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2004-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published under the title "Does the trust game measure trust?" in: Economics Letters, vol. 115 (1), April 2012, pp. 20-23

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Related works:
Working Paper: Verified Trust: Reciprocity, Altruism and Noise in Trust Games (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:04.15

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