In this paper we present the design of a two-stage experiment which aims to measure trusting and trustworthiness in a representative sample of the British population. In the first part we discuss the shortcomings of the most common design of the ‘trust-game’ experiment in eliciting information about clear and cogent notions of trusting and trustworthiness, and in the second part we present an alternative design, which we call the ‘framed binary trust game’. The basic design will be administered to a sample of 200 subjects who were formerly members of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). In the third part of the paper, we extend this design to allow the ‘truster’ to purchase some information about the ‘trustee’ so as to make the experiment a better representation of real-life trust decisions. We plan in a second stage to run the extended experiment on a larger sample of about 1000 subjects.
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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
2216.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Social Norms and Social Capital; Social Networks Economic Anthropology
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References listed on IDEAS 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.:
Edward L. Glaeser & David I. Laibson & José A. Scheinkman & Christine L. Soutter, 2000.
"Measuring Trust,"
The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
MIT Press, vol. 115(3), pages 811-846, August.
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