Abstract: We implement a trust game in which the trustee can write a free-form pre-play message for the trustor. The main twist in our design is that there is a 50% probability that the message is delivered to the trustor and a 50% probability that the message is replaced by an empty sheet. We...

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show...

In this paper, we address the concept of trust by combining (i) the self-reported trust and belief in trustworthiness of others from a general unpaid questionnaire, (ii) choices made in a social valuation task designed to measure subjects' distributional preferences, (iii) strategies submitted...

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their within-subject stability over...

We conduct experiments in urban slums to measure trust and cooperation and to see how behavior varies with demographic factors and associational measures of social capital. Overall, we find high contribution rates among Thai and Vietnamese participants in a voluntary contribution game, and we...

Recent insights from the ‘embodied cognition’ perspective in cognitive science, supported by neural research, provide a basis for a ‘methodological interactionism’ that transcends both the methodological individualism of economics and the methodological collectivism of (some) sociology,...

We examine an experimental gift exchange game in which the players can improve upon the unique no-gifts equilibrium through cooperative gift giving. The main feature of the study is that there are two different types of gift exchange, which we call simple and complex exchange, respectively....

This paper analyzes the relations between social capital, institutions and trust.These concepts are full of ambiguity and confusion.This paper attempts to dissolve some of the confusion, by distinguishing trust and control, and analyzing institutional and relational conditions of trust.It...