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Playing the trust game with other people’s money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Ola Kvaløy  and
Miguel Luzuriaga
Ola Kvaløy*
Affiliation:
University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway
Miguel Luzuriaga
Affiliation:
University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We experimentally investigate to what extent people trust and honor trust when they are playing with other people’s money (OPM). We adopt the well-known trust game by Berg et al. (in Games Econ. Behav. 10:122–142, 1995), with the 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 receivers return significantly less money when senders send a third party’s money. As a result, trust is only profitable in the baseline trust game, but not in the OPM treatment. The treatment effect among the receivers is gender specific. Women return significantly less money in OPM than in baseline, while there is no such treatment effect among men. Moreover, women return significantly less than men in the OPM treatment.

Keywords

Social PreferenceDictator GameTrust GameTobit RegressionInequity Aversion
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 615 - 630
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-013-9386-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We would like to thank the Editor, two referees and Jim Andreoni, Alexander Cappelen, Gary Charness, Kristoffer Eriksen, Åshild Johnsen, Klaus Mohn, Mari Rege, Bettina Rochenbach and participants at the Nordic conference on Behavioral and Experimental Economics in Lund, the International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioral Economics in Castellón, the ESA Meeting in Xiamen and the ESA meeting in Tucson for helpful comments and discussions. Financial support from the Norwegian Research Council is greatly appreciated.

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