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

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  • Jacob Dijkstra

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.

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  • Jacob Dijkstra, 2013. "Put your money where your mouth is: Reciprocity, social preferences, trust and contributions to public goods," Rationality and Society, , vol. 25(3), pages 290-334, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:25:y:2013:i:3:p:290-334
    DOI: 10.1177/1043463113492305
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Schüssler, Katharina & Schüssler, Michael & Mühlbauer, Daniel, 2018. "Individual Differences and Contribution Sequences in Threshold Public Goods," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 88, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.

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