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Trust and Trustworthiness in Anonymous Virtual Worlds

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Author Info

  • Sascha Füllbrunn

    () (Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)

  • Katharina Richwien
  • Abdolkarim Sadrieh

    () (Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg)

Abstract

Virtual communities like Second Life represent an economic factor with increasing potential, but may induce behavior that deviates from real world experience. We introduce a new experimental design that is based on the trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe 1995), but eliminates the problem of multiple virtual identities. We conduct one treatment of the experiment in the virtual world Second Life and compare the results to the First Life control treatment that we conduct on our university Campus. In Second Life, we find significantly lower investment levels, but significantly higher average returns than in our First Life treatment or in the literature. The lower investments may be due to the fact that the return schedules observed in Second Life are significantly more erratic than in First Life.

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File URL: http://www.ww.uni-magdeburg.de/fwwdeka/femm/a2009_Dateien/2009_33.pdf
File Function: First version, 2009
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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Faculty of Economics and Management in its series FEMM Working Papers with number 09033.

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Length: 20 pages
Date of creation: Oct 2009
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:mag:wpaper:09033

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Related research

Keywords: investment game; online community;

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Cited by:
  1. Lübbe, Ingmar & Bolle, Friedel, 2011. "Who helps whom? Risk taking and solidarity in a virtual world experiment," Discussion Papers 310, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics.
  2. Christoph Safferling & Aaron Lowen, 2011. "Economics in the Kingdom of Loathing: Analysis of Virtual Market Data," Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz 2011-30, Department of Economics, University of Konstanz.

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