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Social Relationships and Trust

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  • Christine Binzel

    () (Dartmouth College, USA)

  • Dietmar Fehr

Abstract

While social relationships play an important role for individuals to cope with missing market institutions, they also limit individuals’ range of trading partners. This paper aims at under-standing the determinants of trust at various social distances when information asymmetries are present. Among participants from an informal housing area in Cairo we find that the increase in trust following a reduction in social distance comes from the fact that trustors are much more inclined to follow their beliefs when interacting with their friend. When interacting with an ex-ante unknown agent instead, the decision to trust is mainly driven by social preferences. Nevertheless, trustors underestimate their friend’s intrinsic motivation to cooperate, leading to a loss in social welfare. We relate this to the agents’ inability to signal their trustworthiness in an environment characterized by strong social norms.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Economic Research Forum in its series Working Papers with number 542.

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Length: 29 pages
Date of creation: Sep 2010
Date of revision: Sep 2010
Publication status: Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)
Handle: RePEc:erg:wpaper:542

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