Social capital and equilibrium selection in Stag Hunt games

Surveys of trusting attitudes are found to correlate with growth and development outcomes. The question of why trust attitudes correlate with economic growth remains open however. I argue that trust surveys capture facets of social capital not previously investigated, namely, coordination. Hence a complete investigation of the relationship between trust attitudes in growth must encompass their predictive power in a coordination game. This study shows that affirmative responses to surveys of trust attitudes correlate with and predict efficiency-supporting behavior in a Stag Hunt game.     

Money management in blended and nuclear families

In Finland, 9% of the families with children are blended families. Though both the absolute number and the proportion of blended families is increasing throughout Europe, there is still little research information available on how they manage their finances. Blended families are an interesting group to study because their money management is clearly more complex than that of traditional nuclear families. In this paper I examine the extent of the differences between blended and nuclear families in money management, with special reference to bank accounts and the conducting of payments. I also seek to identify factors explaining the differences discovered. The research data comes from an Internet survey conducted in November 2006, which yielded answers from 469 Finnish families with children.The results, confirming earlier findings, suggested that money management is more separated in blended families than in nuclear ones. In nuclear families, both the bank accounts and the paying of expenditures are consistently managed jointly, whereas the spouses in blended families prefer separate bank accounts and display several different practices in the paying of common expenditures. In nuclear families the adults pay the expenditures together, but in blended ones they are responsible for the expenditures of their own biological children.     

Undeclared work: A dark side of social trust?

A Eurobarometer survey from 2007 reports that most undeclared work in the EU 27 takes place in the three most high-trusting and non-corrupt countries—Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. This is somewhat surprising since social trust is normally associated with economic outcomes that are beneficial to society. The aim of this paper is to test whether undeclared work is a dark side of social trust. Since the Eurobarometer data may contain inaccurate self-reports on undeclared work and social trust may affect the willingness to provide truthful answers, we use more appropriate data in our test. Specifically, we use data from one single country (Danish Values Studies, 1999/2008) and undeclared work morale as an indicator of actual undeclared work—where undeclared work morale is the degree to which a person thinks undeclared work is wrong. We find a significant negative relationship between social trust and undeclared work morale after adjusting for a number of important controls. Thus, the evidence is in line with the bivariate picture of the Eurobarometer survey and suggests a dark side of social trust. We provide some initial explanations.     

La Familia - How Trust Towards Family Decreases Female Labor Force Participation

This paper investigates whether comprehensive trust towards immediate family members leads to a decrease in female labor force participation in Sub Saharan African countries. Using three recent waves, third, fourth and fifth rounds of the Afrobarometer survey data allows us to capture the willingness to participate in the labor market as well as the level of trust individuals have towards their family members. We find that a high amount of trust significantly decreases labor force participation vary in range from minimum of 7 percent to 13 percent at maximum in our probit estimations. Moreover, the statistical as well as economic effects are significantly stronger for females than the effect for males. Our main contribution to the emerging economies literature in informal institutions is that we are able to show how different cultural traits such as family ties lead to different choices in terms of participation in the labor market.     

What’s in a frame? Goal framing,trust and reciprocity

Economists often rely on the Berg et al. (1995) trust game, or variants thereof, to identify levels of trust and reciprocity, which are fundamental to discussions of social capital. But to what extent is behavior in this game sensitive to the way the instructions are framed? We use the Berg et al. trust game played for ten rounds with random re-matching to study this. We implement a number of variations in the way the game is presented to subjects. We show that levels of trust, reciprocity and returns to trust are significantly higher under “goal framing”, which highlights the conflict inherent in the game, between self-interest and maximizing social surplus. Furthermore, with such framing, trust measured via the experimental game exhibits significant positive correlation with trust measured via the Social Values Orientation questionnaire.     

Sex differences in trust and trustworthiness: A meta-analysis of the trust game and the gift-exchange game

We present a meta-analytic review of the literature on sex differences in the trust game (174 effect sizes) and the related gift-exchange game (35 effect sizes). Based on parental investment theory and social role theory we expected men to be more trusting and women to be more trustworthy. Indeed, men were more trusting in the trust game (g = 0.22), yet we found no significant sex difference in trust in the gift-exchange game (g = 0.15). Regarding trustworthiness, we found no significant sex difference in the trust game (g = −0.04), and we found men, not women, to be more trustworthy in the gift-exchange game (g = 0.33). These results suggest that men send more money than women do when their money is going to be multiplied, thereby creating an efficiency gain. This so-called “male multiplier effect” may be explained by a stronger psychological tendency in men to acquire resources.     

Conceptualizing trust: a holistic Chinese view to bridge divergences and dichotomies

This research study seeks to understand and describe how people in a Chinese society define trust in daily life. Employing a qualitative phenomenological method, data were obtained through in-depth interviews with 14 adult Chinese individuals in northern Taiwan. This research pinpoints prior misconceptions of trust, examines competing approaches to trust that have led to diverse definitions, adopts a holistic Chinese view of trust that bridges prior divergent views, mediates the agency-structure and trust-distrust dichotomies, and focuses on trust strategies applicable to different situations. The findings reveal that trust is a dyadic relationship in which how the trustee demonstrates his or her trustworthiness to gain trust and how the trustor decides to trust are likely to be affected not only by personal choices based on prior knowledge and experiences but also the external social and cultural norms of the society. The findings advance the existing knowledge of trust conceptualization and extend its applicability to broader Chinese societies. They have implications for strategies for relationship and trust-building for Westerners as they engage in global socio-economic discourse with Chinese.     

Trust and risk revisited

A trustor faces a risky choice in the trust game when he acts upon his belief regarding the chances of betrayal by the trustee. Despite intensive research there is no clear evidence for a link between lottery risk preferences and risk involved in trusting others. We argue that this is due to crucial differences between the risk measurements in the two settings. Trusting is giving up control to a human while lottery risk arises from a mechanistic randomization device. We propose a risky trust game that experimentally measures risk in the same context as the standard trust game, but nevertheless reduces the trust decision to objective risk. Our results show that transfers in the trust game can indeed be explained by individual risk attitudes elicited with the risky trust game, while lottery risk preferences have no explanatory power.     

The role of beliefs,trust, and risk in contributions to a public good

This paper experimentally investigates if and how beliefs, trust, and risk attitudes are associated with cooperative behavior. By applying incentivized elicitation methods to measure these concepts, we find that beliefs about others’ cooperation and trust are positively correlated with cooperation in a public goods game. However, even though contributing to a public good resembles a situation of making decisions under strategic uncertainty, elicited risk preferences do not seem to explain cooperation in a systematic way.     

Fairness as a constraint on reciprocity: Playing simultaneously as dictator and trustee

The dictator and trust games are two common games used to identify the existence of social preferences. However, in many social interactions, individuals face the environments in both games simultaneously: for example we are often engaged in charitable donations to strangers, as well as reciprocal exchange with family members and colleagues. As giving in one game could be prioritised over giving in the other, it is important to have participants play both as a dictator in the dictator game and as a trustee in a trust game simultaneously. The results indicate that when the recipient in the dictator game is significantly poorer relative to the dictator, the dictator tends to return an amount to the trustor such that the trustor neither makes a loss nor profit from trusting. This suggests that the presence of a sufficiently strong incentive to make transfers as a dictator may completely crowd-out any monetary returns to trust.     

Group-based trust,trustworthiness and voluntary cooperation: Evidence from experimental and survey data in China

Trust, trustworthiness and cooperation are crucial in achieving social goals, and are thus essential components of social capital. This paper reports the results of a series of lab and artefactual field experiments carried out in Shanghai to evaluate some of the key indicators of social capital in China. The groups selected for the study are middle school and undergraduate university students and community residents. The experiments comprise two public goods games, a gambling game and a trust game. The overall level of trust is negatively related to age, although trusting behavior is also affected by other factors, such as risk-taking.     

FOOLING MYSELF OR FOOLING OBSERVERS? AVOIDING SOCIAL PRESSURES BY MANIPULATING PERCEPTIONS OF DESERVINGNESS OF OTHERS

We present a novel experiment demonstrating strategies selfish individuals utilize to avoid social pressure to be altruistic. Subjects participate in a trust game, after which they have an opportunity to state their beliefs about their opponent's actions. Subsequently, subjects participate in a task designed to “reveal” their true beliefs. Subjects who initially made selfish choices falsely state their beliefs about their opponent's kindness. Their “revealed” beliefs were significantly more accurate, which exposed subjects' knowledge that their selfishness was unjustifiable by their opponent's behavior. The initial false statements complied with social norms, suggesting subjects' attempts to project a more favorable social image. (JEL C9, D03, D83)     

Trust in humans and robots: Economically similar but emotionally different

Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a valid concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and self-reported emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed behaviors by humans in analogous situations. We find that people invest similarly in humans and robots. By contrast the social emotions (i.e., gratitude, anger, pride, guilt) elicited by the interactions (but not the non-social emotions) differed across human and robot trust games. Emotional reactions depended on the trust game interaction, and how another person was affected.     

Words speak louder than money

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual interaction. We nest our findings in the standard version of the investment game. Our data provide evidence that while both stand-alone mechanisms enhance trust, a gift performs significantly worse than a message. Moreover, when a gift is combined with sending a message, it can be counterproductive.     

Building Community Trust Through Cooperatives: A Case Study of a Worker-Owned Homecare Cooperative

Trusting relationships bind people together. Building community trust is increasingly being identified as a viable strategy for improving the well-being of community members. This article explores how cooperatives build trust among worker-owners as well as with their clients and other professionals. It reviews theoretical and empirical perspectives on trust and cooperatives. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews, document review and a survey. It was observed that cooperatives provide regular contacts among members, and between members and their clients and professionals during training, conferences, task oriented committees, general membership meetings, and social events. This fosters shared understanding, empathy, openness, and confidence, which in turn promotes the building and maintenance of deeper and wider trust.     

Trust and reciprocity among international groups: Experimental evidence from Austria and Japan

This paper explores national identity in trust and reciprocity at the intra- and international levels by adopting a modified trust game played among groups from Austria and Japan, wherein subjects play the roles of trustor and trustee consecutively without any information feedback. Although the intranational trust levels in both countries are identical, the international trust for Japanese groups is less than that of Austrian groups. On the other hand, the international reciprocity for Japanese groups is greater than that of Austrian groups. Additionally, the Japanese reciprocation level toward Austrians is higher than that toward Japanese.     

Risk mitigation and trust: Experimental Evidence from Jordan and the United States

This paper examines how trust and trustworthiness respond to lowering the principal’s risk in cultural settings focused on risk mitigation vs. risk prevention. We employ a binary-choice trust game and show that principals are confronted with a complex optimization problem: risk mitigation lowers the principal’s cost of betrayal but if agents are inequality averse or reciprocally minded, it can also increase its likelihood. This may be exacerbated in cultures not used to fostering trust by risk mitigation. Our experiments suggest that lowering risk only increases trust in the United States but not in Jordan. In both countries, trustworthiness decreases as the principal’s vulnerability decreases. We extend our findings to naturally occurring vulnerabilities in addition to the financial ones created in the laboratory.     

EFFECTS OF QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN ON THE QUALITY OF SURVEY DATA

The importance of format, graphic layout, and question routinginstructions on the quality of survey data has been acknowledgedfor self-administered survey instruments, but the significanceof these factors for questionnaires administered by interviewershas not been recognized equally. This paper examines two studiesin which interviewers used different questionnaire designs toadminister the same set of survey questions to randomly selectedadult respondents in housing units that made up area probabilitysamples of the Detroit metropolitan area. The paper presentsempirical evidence of specific effects (questions skipped inerror, unprobed answers) directly attributable to the choiceof questionnaire design. The analysis shows that question nairedesign choices can either help or hurt the quality of data collectedby interviewers. Furthermore, the behaviors of experienced andinexperienced interviewers are affected in similar ways. Inother words, interviewing experience does not compensate forformat deficits in the design of survey instruments.     

Back to nature! Or not? Urban dwellers and their forest in berlin

What type of urban nature do urban dwellers prefer? Contributing to this ongoing discussion, this study presents the results of an internet and on-site field survey on general use and visitation pattern conducted in Grunewald Forest via a questionnaire; this is a 3000 ha area southwest of Berlin, Germany. The questions were developed in close cooperation with the local forestry administration and targeted the uncovering of user-specific needs and climate change-related conflicts. More than 1300 valid answers were analyzed, which made it possible to (1) identify and characterize different visitor groups, (2) identify reasons for an urban forest visit, (3) uncover the needs for infrastructure and information, (4) reflect on the survey methods used. The interesting findings include (I) the reasons for a visit highly coincide with forest-related properties in particular; however, the infrastructure preferences reveal the desire for managed greenspace; and (II) the answers obtained from the field differ significantly from those obtained online in various respects. The differences found suggest that the survey, with both online and on-site answers, is a major advantage for future studies regarding urban green infrastructure use. These results can be fruitfully used to inform urban forest management regarding user needs and create a better forestry information policy in the future.     

What's behind public trust in news media: A comparative study of America and China

The study first examines the media identification logic that the prime evaluating indicator for news media is public trust. Perceptions of trust are not only important from a marketing perspective, but also form a vital component of audiences' aesthetic criticism of news and news sources. Comparing people's attitudes towards media in America and China, this study finds media credibility ratings in China are much higher than those in America. Does this suggest that Chinese media are more credible, or are survey reports of public trust influenced by other factors? This study considers three perspectives for considering differences in reports of public trust – operation dynamics, imaged power, and national identity. We consider to what degree, and under what conditions, could the survey reports of perceived public trust in media be related to media system differences, both among countries and over time. The study also examines the role played by structural dialectics such as profit orientation or propaganda orientation; professionalism orientation or authority orientation; and imagined community or heterogeneity construction. Finally, given the limits of survey methods and wording, the study brings forward an evaluation framework for the availability of transnational comparisons of media credibility, based on five evaluating dimensions of identity mechanism: professionalism identity, antagonism identity, heterogeneity identity, public sphere identity, and the “Other” identity.