IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolec/v70y2011i4p651-658.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Trust, reputation and relationships in grazing rights markets: An experimental economic study

Author

Listed:
  • Reeson, Andrew F.
  • Tisdell, John G.
  • McAllister, Ryan R.J.

Abstract

Trust is frequently a requirement for economic exchanges and the management of natural resources. Providing public information on past actions can promote trust through the formation of reputations. We developed an economic experiment to test whether a formal reputation mechanism could facilitate trusting relationships in the tradable grazing rights markets. Providing information to create formal public reputations for market participants did not increase the overall efficiency of the market. However, it did result in greater equality of income between partners, suggesting that participants showed more concern for their partners when they knew they would be rated. Even with public reputation information, bilateral relationships remained central to the market. Market failures in existing grazing rights markets may be better addressed by measures to increase communication between partners rather than simply relying on a formal reputation mechanism.

Suggested Citation

  • Reeson, Andrew F. & Tisdell, John G. & McAllister, Ryan R.J., 2011. "Trust, reputation and relationships in grazing rights markets: An experimental economic study," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(4), pages 651-658, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:70:y:2011:i:4:p:651-658
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921-8009(10)00452-0
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ernst Fehr & Georg Kirchsteiger & Arno Riedl, 1993. "Does Fairness Prevent Market Clearing? An Experimental Investigation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 108(2), pages 437-459.
    2. Ernst Fehr & Simon Gachter & Georg Kirchsteiger, 1997. "Reciprocity as a Contract Enforcement Device: Experimental Evidence," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(4), pages 833-860, July.
    3. Ernst Fehr & Martin Brown & Christian Zehnder, 2009. "On Reputation: A Microfoundation of Contract Enforcement and Price Rigidity," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 119(536), pages 333-353, March.
    4. Martin Brown & Armin Falk & Ernst Fehr, 2004. "Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(3), pages 747-780, May.
    5. Martin Brown & Christian Zehnder, 2007. "Credit Reporting, Relationship Banking, and Loan Repayment," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(8), pages 1883-1918, December.
    6. Gary E. Bolton & Elena Katok & Axel Ockenfels, 2004. "How Effective Are Electronic Reputation Mechanisms? An Experimental Investigation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 50(11), pages 1587-1602, November.
    7. Iris Bohnet & Steffen Huck, 2004. "Repetition and Reputation: Implications for Trust and Trustworthiness When Institutions Change," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(2), pages 362-366, May.
    8. T. K. Ahn & R. Mark Isaac & Timothy C. Salmon, 2008. "Endogenous Group Formation," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 10(2), pages 171-194, April.
    9. Bohnet, Iris & Zeckhauser, Richard, 2004. "Trust, risk and betrayal," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 467-484, December.
    10. M.A. Nowak & K. Sigmund, 1998. "Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity by Image Scoring/ The Dynamics of Indirect Reciprocity," Working Papers ir98040, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
    11. Elinor Ostrom, 2000. "Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 137-158, Summer.
    12. Ahn, T.K. & Ostrom, Elinor & Walker, James, 2010. "A common-pool resource experiment with postgraduate subjects from 41 countries," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(12), pages 2624-2633, October.
    13. Marco A. Janssen, 2006. "Evolution of Cooperation when Feedback to Reputation Scores is Voluntary," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 9(1), pages 1-17.
    14. Teague, W.R. & Kreuter, U.P. & Grant, W.E. & Diaz-Solis, H. & Kothmann, M.M., 2009. "Economic implications of maintaining rangeland ecosystem health in a semi-arid savanna," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(5), pages 1417-1429, March.
    15. Quaas, Martin F. & Baumgartner, Stefan & Becker, Christian & Frank, Karin & Muller, Birgit, 2007. "Uncertainty and sustainability in the management of rangelands," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 251-266, April.
    16. Campbell, Bruce M. & Gordon, Iain J. & Luckert, Martin K. & Petheram, Lisa & Vetter, Susanne, 2006. "In search of optimal stocking regimes in semi-arid grazing lands: One size does not fit all," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 75-85, November.
    17. Bolton, Gary E. & Katok, Elena & Ockenfels, Axel, 2005. "Cooperation among strangers with limited information about reputation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(8), pages 1457-1468, August.
    18. Seinen, Ingrid & Schram, Arthur, 2006. "Social status and group norms: Indirect reciprocity in a repeated helping experiment," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 581-602, April.
    19. Boero, Riccardo & Bravo, Giangiacomo & Castellani, Marco & Squazzoni, Flaminio, 2009. "Reputational cues in repeated trust games," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 38(6), pages 871-877, December.
    20. Ahn, T.K. & Isaac, R. Mark & Salmon, Timothy C., 2009. "Coming and going: Experiments on endogenous group sizes for excludable public goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1-2), pages 336-351, February.
    21. Berg Joyce & Dickhaut John & McCabe Kevin, 1995. "Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 122-142, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vogt, Nora & Bizer, Kilian, 2013. "Lock-in effects in competitive bidding schemes for payments for ecosystem services: Revisiting the fundamental transformation," Center for European, Governance and Economic Development Research Discussion Papers 158, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.
    2. Vogt, Nora & Reeson, Andrew F. & Bizer, Kilian, 2013. "Communication, competition and social gift exchange in an auction for public good provision," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 11-19.
    3. Simanti Banerjee & Timothy N. Cason & Frans P. de Vries & Nick Hanley, 2015. "Spatial Coordination in Agglomeration Bonus Schemes with Transaction Costs and Communication: An Experimental Study," Discussion Papers in Environment and Development Economics 2015-10, University of St. Andrews, School of Geography and Sustainable Development.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:70:y:2011:i:4:p:651-658. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Dana Niculescu). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.