Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/115058 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
NRN Working Paper, NRN: The Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State No. 1019
Publisher: 
Johannes Kepler University Linz, NRN - The Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State, Linz
Abstract: 
We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide evidence on the microfoundation of this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark using a design that enables us to disentangle preferences for cooperation from beliefs about others’ cooperation. We find that the standard trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others’ cooperation. Moreover, we show that the “fairness question”, a recently proposed alternative to the standard trust question, is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.
Subjects: 
Social capital
Trust
Fairness
Public goods
Cooperation
Experiment
JEL: 
H41
C91
C72
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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