This paper examines whether trust is an investment decision under uncertainty, based on the expectation of trustworthiness, and whether trustworthiness is reciprocity, conditional on one’s counterpart’s behavior. In trust experiments in Russia, South Africa and the United States, two thirds of the subjects who trust do not expect trust to pay monetarily. We find substantial heterogeneity in motivation: Expectations of return account for most of women’s trust, and reciprocity for most of Americans’ trustworthiness. Men’s trust and Russians’ and South Africans’ trustworthiness are significantly related to unconditional kindness as measured by subjects’ behavior in dictator games, us ing a within-subject design.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) in its series CREMA Working Paper Series with number
2004-07.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)