IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/joepsy/v32y2011i5p890-897.html

Incentivising trust

Author

Listed:
  • Lenton, Pamela
  • Mosley, Paul

Abstract

We argue that trust can be incentivised by measures which increase the ability of trusters to protect themselves against risk. We work within the framework originally established by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) in which trust is measured experimentally as the ability to generate reciprocity in response to an initial offer of money within a two-person game. An incentive is conveyed both by means of variations in the multiplier applied to the first player’s initial offer and by giving the first player the opportunity to insure themselves against the possibility that the second player will fail to reciprocate their initial offer. Measured trust is strongly responsive to both these incentives. Thus third parties have the ability to influence the outcome of the game, not only, as in the analysis of Charness, Cobo-Reyes, and Jimenez (2008), by punishing failure to reciprocate and rewarding ‘good’ initial offers, but also by offering protection which strengthens the first player’s risk efficacy, or ratio of assets to risk.

Suggested Citation

  • Lenton, Pamela & Mosley, Paul, 2011. "Incentivising trust," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 890-897.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:32:y:2011:i:5:p:890-897
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2011.07.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487011001024
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joep.2011.07.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Zak, Paul J & Knack, Stephen, 2001. "Trust and Growth," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 111(470), pages 295-321, April.
    2. John Hudson, 2006. "Institutional Trust and Subjective Well‐Being across the EU," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(1), pages 43-62, February.
    3. Jennifer Zelmer, 2003. "Linear Public Goods Experiments: A Meta-Analysis," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 6(3), pages 299-310, November.
    4. Stephen Knack & Philip Keefer, 1997. "Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(4), pages 1251-1288.
    5. Anderhub, Vital & Engelmann, Dirk & Guth, Werner, 2002. "An experimental study of the repeated trust game with incomplete information," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 197-216, June.
    6. Cox, James C., 2004. "How to identify trust and reciprocity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 46(2), pages 260-281, February.
    7. Paul F. Whiteley, 2000. "Economic Growth and Social Capital," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 48(3), pages 443-466, June.
    8. Charness, Gary & Cobo-Reyes, Ramón & Jiménez, Natalia, 2008. "An investment game with third-party intervention," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 18-28, October.
    9. Stefan Duffner & Markus M. Schmid & Heinz Zimmermann, 2009. "Trust and Success in Venture Capital Financing—an Empirical Analysis with German Survey Data," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(1), pages 15-43, February.
    10. 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.
    11. Edward L. Glaeser & David I. Laibson & José A. Scheinkman & Christine L. Soutter, 2000. "Measuring Trust," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(3), pages 811-846.
      • Glaeser, Edward Ludwig & Laibson, David I. & Scheinkman, Jose A. & Soutter, Christine L., 2000. "Measuring Trust," Scholarly Articles 4481497, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    12. Ernst Fehr & Urs Fischbacher & Michael Kosfeld, 2005. "Neuroeconomic Foundations of Trust and Social Preferences: Initial Evidence," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 346-351, May.
    13. Orazio Attanasio & Luca Pellerano & Sandra Polanía Reyes, 2009. "Building Trust? Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes and Social Capital," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 30(2), pages 139-177, June.
    14. Charness, Gary B & Dufwenberg, Martin, 2008. "Broken Promises: An Experiment," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt6836m74q, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    15. Ben-Ner, Avner & Halldorsson, Freyr, 2010. "Trusting and trustworthiness: What are they, how to measure them, and what affects them," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 64-79, February.
    16. 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.
    17. Fehr, Ernst & Fischbacher, Urs & Kosfeld, Michael, 2005. "Neuroeconomic Foundation of Trust and Social Preferences," CEPR Discussion Papers 5127, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    18. René Fahr & Bernd Irlenbusch, 2008. "Identifying personality traits to enhance trust between organisations: an experimental approach," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(6), pages 469-487.
    19. Bohnet, Iris & Zeckhauser, Richard, 2004. "Trust, risk and betrayal," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 467-484, December.
    20. Michael Kosfeld & Markus Heinrichs & Paul J. Zak & Urs Fischbacher & Ernst Fehr, 2005. "Oxytocin increases trust in humans," Nature, Nature, vol. 435(7042), pages 673-676, June.
    21. Niclas Berggren & Henrik Jordahl, 2006. "Free to Trust: Economic Freedom and Social Capital," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(2), pages 141-169, May.
    22. Abigail Barr, 2003. "Trust and expected trustworthiness: experimental evidence from zimbabwean villages," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 113(489), pages 614-630, July.
    23. 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. Johnson, Noel D. & Mislin, Alexandra A., 2011. "Trust games: A meta-analysis," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 32(5), pages 865-889.
    2. Xu, Cheng, 2021. "Effects of urbanization on trust: Evidence from an experiment in the field," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    3. Pamela Lenton & Mike Masiye & Paul Mosley, 2017. "Taxpayer’s dilemma: how can ‘fiscal contracts’ work in developing countries?," Working Papers 2017004, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics.
    4. Eric van Dijk & Varia Makagonova & Erik W. de Kwaadsteniet & Manon Schutter, 2017. "Deterrence-based trust in bargaining: Introducing a new experimental paradigm," Journal of Trust Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(1), pages 71-89, January.
    5. Joanna Paliszkiewicz, 2012. "Managers’ Orientation on Trust and Organizational Performance," Jindal Journal of Business Research, , vol. 1(2), pages 153-161, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Wahl, Fabian, 2012. "Why it matters what people think: Beliefs, legal origins and the deep roots of trust," FZID Discussion Papers 52-2012, University of Hohenheim, Center for Research on Innovation and Services (FZID).
    2. Goeschl, Timo & Jarke, Johannes, 2014. "Trust, but verify? When trustworthiness is observable only through (costly) monitoring," WiSo-HH Working Paper Series 20, University of Hamburg, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, WISO Research Laboratory.
    3. Schwerter, Frederik & Zimmermann, Florian, 2020. "Determinants of trust: The role of personal experiences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 413-425.
    4. Ernst Fehr, 2009. "On The Economics and Biology of Trust," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 7(2-3), pages 235-266, 04-05.
    5. Ashraf, Nava & Bohnet, Iris & Piankov, Nikita, 2003. "Is Trust a Bad Investment?," Working Paper Series rwp03-047, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    6. Michael Manapat & David Rand, 2012. "Delayed and Inconsistent Information and the Evolution of Trust," Dynamic Games and Applications, Springer, vol. 2(4), pages 401-410, December.
    7. Bejarano, Hernán & Gillet, Joris & Rodriguez-Lara, Ismael, 2021. "Trust and trustworthiness after negative random shocks," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    8. Chaudhuri, Ananish & Li, Yaxiong & Paichayontvijit, Tirnud, 2016. "What’s in a frame? Goal framing, trust and reciprocity," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 117-135.
    9. James Andreoni, 2018. "Satisfaction Guaranteed: When Moral Hazard Meets Moral Preferences," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 10(4), pages 159-189, November.
    10. Daniel Ji & Pablo Guillen, 2010. "Trust, discrimination and acculturation Experimental evidence on Asian international and Australian domestic university students," ThE Papers 09/12, Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada..
    11. Houser, Daniel & Schunk, Daniel & Winter, Joachim, 2010. "Distinguishing trust from risk: An anatomy of the investment game," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 74(1-2), pages 72-81, May.
    12. Tu, Qin & Bulte, Erwin, 2010. "Trust, Market Participation and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from Rural China," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(8), pages 1179-1190, August.
    13. Hong, Kessely & Bohnet, Iris, 2007. "Status and distrust: The relevance of inequality and betrayal aversion," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 197-213, April.
    14. Martin G. Kocher, 2015. "How Trust in Social Dilemmas Evolves with Age," CESifo Working Paper Series 5447, CESifo.
    15. Sutter, Matthias & Kocher, Martin G., 2007. "Trust and trustworthiness across different age groups," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 364-382, May.
    16. Kim, Jeongbin & Putterman, Louis & Zhang, Xinyi, 2022. "Trust, Beliefs and Cooperation: Excavating a Foundation of Strong Economies," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    17. Rahul Mehrotra & Vincent Somville & Lore vandewalle, 2016. "Increasing trust in the bank to enhance savings: Experimental evidence from India," CMI Working Papers 1, CMI (Chr. Michelsen Institute), Bergen, Norway.
    18. Huang, Li & Murnighan, J. Keith, 2010. "What's in a name? Subliminally activating trusting behavior," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 111(1), pages 62-70, January.
    19. Juan Camilo Cardenas & Jeffrey Carpenter, 2008. "Behavioural Development Economics: Lessons from Field Labs in the Developing World," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(3), pages 311-338.
    20. Aoyagi, Keitaro & Sawada, Yasuyuki & Shoji, Masahiro, 2014. "Does Infrastructure Facilitate Social Capital Accumulation? Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in a Developing Country," Working Papers 65, JICA Research Institute.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • C70 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - General
    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:joepsy:v:32:y:2011:i:5:p:890-897. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 bibliographic 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/joep .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.