We study to what extent identification does matter for trustfulness and trustworthiness to emerge in a population of players. Our experimen- tal protocol is designed for isolating the effects of trustees’ identification. Trustees’ identification is a necessary condition for introducing a reputation mechanism. We run three treatments. In each treatment groups 6 players interact repeatedly and randomly and play a 30 periods investment game (Berg & al. 1995). In the first treatment players can’t identify each other, in the second one players can identify each other as trustee and in the third one players identify each other both as trustee and trustor. We show that, according to the expectation, trustees’ identification has a positive effect on reciprocity. However it doesn’t affect the average trust in the population. Trust is significantly higher than in the complete anonymous treatment only when players identify each other in both roles. We show that this enhance of trust is the result of mutual trust-reciprocity relationships formation.
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
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier in its series Working Papers with number
07-06.