IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/cegedp/383.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A radius of trust? Contrasting insights from experiments and survey data

Author

Listed:
  • Parlasca, Martin C.
  • Hermann, Daniel
  • Mußhoff, Oliver

Abstract

A person's reach of efficient economic activities is strongly influenced by the extent to which she grants trust towards other people. The radius of trust has recently gained interest as a concept to elucidate the underlying principles of how far a person extends her trust. However, empirical research on the radius of trust has up to now only been grounded in survey data. In this paper we use an incentivized experiment, namely the trust game, and two sets of survey questions to i) identify and localize the radius of trust and ii) contrast experimental and survey results regarding the radius of trust. To do so, we measure trust layers of 394 semi-nomadic pastoralists in rural Kenya conditional on three levels of social distance: trust towards people from one's own village, trust towards people from a neighboring village, and trust towards city dwellers from the county capital. Experimental data suggest that city dwellers are excluded from the radius of trust and face particularly low trust levels, while people from one's own village and from neighboring villages are inside the radius of trust. Survey data do not suggest any clear-cut radius of trust. Implications for development practitioners and further research on the radius of trust are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Parlasca, Martin C. & Hermann, Daniel & Mußhoff, Oliver, 2019. "A radius of trust? Contrasting insights from experiments and survey data," University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics 383, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:cegedp:383
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/204280/1/1677419903.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    radius of trust; social distance; trust; field experiment; pastoralism; Kenya;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:zbw:cegedp:383. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cdgoede.html .

    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.