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Trust and trustworthiness in games: An experimental study of intergenerational advice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Andrew Schotter  and
Barry Sopher
Andrew Schotter
Affiliation:
Department of Economics New York University
Barry Sopher
Affiliation:
Department of Economics Rutgers University
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Abstract

This paper investigates the development of conventions of trust in what we call intergenerational games, i.e., games played by a sequence of non-overplapping agents, who pass on advice on how to play the game across adjacent generations of players. Using the trust game of Berg et al. (1995) as our experimental decision problem, advice seems to decrease the amount of trust that evolves when this game in played in an inter-generational manner in that it decreases the amount of money sent from Senders to Returners. Ironically, advice increases trustworthiness in that Returners tend to send more back. Further, subjects appear to follows conventions of reciprocity in that they tend to Send more if they think the Returners acted in a “kind” manner, where kind means the Sender sent more money than the receiver expected. Finally, while we find a causal relationship running from trustworthiness to trust, the opposite can not be established. We note that many of our results can only be achieved using the tools offered by inter-generational games. The inter-generational advice offered provides information not available when games are played in their static form. Combining that information with elicited beliefs of the Senders and Returners adds even more information that can be used to investigate the motives that subjects have for doing what they do.

Keywords

TrustTrustworthinessAdviceIntergenerational games

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 123 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

*

‘Resources for this research were provided by National Science Foundation grants SBR-9709962 and SBR-9709079 and by both the Center for Experimental Social Science and the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. We would like to thank Shachar Kariv for both his comments and research assistance. We also thank Mikhael Shor and Judy Goldberg for research assistance, and Yevgeniy Tovshteyn for computer programming.

References

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