Playing the Trust Game with Other People’s Money

We experimentally investigate to what extent people trust and honor trust when they are playing with other people's money. We adopt the well-known trust game by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995), with the important difference that the trustor (sender) who sends money to the trustee (receiver) does this on behalf of a third party. We find that senders who make decisions on behalf of others do not behave significantly different from senders in our baseline trust game who manage their own money. But we find a gender specific treatment effect among the receivers. Women return significantly less money when senders send a third party’s money than when senders send their own money, while there are no such treatment effects among men. Moreover, women return significantly less than men when the sender is managing a third party’s money.