Abstract: Trust is thought to be an important driver of economic growth and other economic outcomes. Previous studies suggest that trust may be a combination of risk attitudes, distributional preferences, betrayal aversion, and beliefs about the probability of being reciprocated. We compare the results of a binary trust game to the results of a series of control treatments that remove the effects of one of or more of these components of trust by design. This allows us to decompose variation in trust behavior into its underlying factors. Our preliminary results suggest that beliefs are the main driver of trust, and that the additional components only play a role when beliefs about reciprocity are sufficiently optimistic.
Jana Friedrichsen, DIW Berlin & Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Topics: Consumers , Personality