We perform a standard trust game experiment in which questionnaires are alternatively administered to participants after the experiment and before even knowing the rules of the game. We find that self declared happiness is significantly affected by trustors’ contribution only when survey questions are answered after having played. This result contributes both to the empirical happiness and behavioural experimental literature. With respect to the first, we demonstrate that general questions on self declared life satisfaction evaluated over the entire life period are affected by most recent events. With respect to the second, we interpret our findings as supporting the existence of “warm glow” preferences. We think that our contribution has also important methodological consequences: warm glow preferences cannot just be tested with the standard approach inferring implied preference structures from players’ choices. Only when measuring ex post the effects on happiness of players’ contribution, net of the outcome of the game, we may conclude that their choice to contribute is due to altruistic and not to strategic motivations. Finally our finding is a confirmation of the importance of experience and not just procedural utility. In our experiment trustor happiness is not affected by the outcome of the game but by the specific pattern of chosen actions, irrespective of the final result.
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.
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.)