Testing the Elicitation of the Minimum Acceptable Probability

Betrayal aversion has been shown to be an important determinant of trust (Bohnet and Zeckhauser, 2004). We study whether the way betrayal aversion is identified (as a difference in Minimum Acceptable Probabilities, MAPs) is affected by beliefs about one’s prospects.In a within-subject design, we find that MAPs are lower the worse the prospects one faces. This is similar to the distributional dependence of valuations elicited using the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak mechanism. Our results suggest that distributional dependence should be accounted for when eliciting MAPs to isolate betrayal aversion