Understanding Trust

Paola Sapienza, Anna Toldra and Luigi Zingales

No 13387, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Several papers study the effect of trust by using the answer to the World Values Survey (WVS) question "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?" to measure the level of trust. Glaeser et al. (2000) question the validity of this measure by showing that it is not correlated with senders' behavior in the standard trust game, but only with his trustworthiness. By using a large sample of German households, Fehr et al. (2003) find the opposite result: WVS-like measures of trust are correlated with the sender's behavior, but not with its trustworthiness. In this paper we resolve this puzzle by recognizing that trust has two components: a belief-based one and a preference based one. While the sender's behavior reflects both, we show that WVS-like measures capture mostly the belief-based component, while questions on past trusting behavior are better at capturing the preference component of trust.

JEL-codes: G10 G30 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
Note: CF
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Published as Paola Sapienza & Anna Toldra‐Simats & Luigi Zingales, 2013. "Understanding Trust," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 123(12), pages 1313-1332, December.

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Journal Article: Understanding Trust (2013)
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