Learning to trust, learning to be trustworthy

Publikation: Working/Discussion PaperWU Working Paper

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Abstract

Interpersonal trust is a one-sided social dilemma. Building on the binary trust game, we ask how trust and trustworthiness can evolve in a population where partners are matched randomly and agents sometimes act as trustors and sometimes as trustees. Trustors have the option to costly check a trustee's last action and to condition their behavior on the signal they receive. We show that the resulting population game admits two components of Nash equilibria. Nevertheless, the long-run outcome of an evolutionary social learning process modeled by the best response dynamics is unique. Even if unconditional distrust initially abounds, the trustors' checking option leads trustees to build a reputation for trustworthiness by honoring trust. This invites free-riders among the trustors who save the costs of checking and trust blindly, until it does no longer pay for trustees to behave in a trustworthy manner. This results in cyclical convergence to a mixed equilibrium with behavioral heterogeneity where suspicious checking and blind trusting coexist while unconditional distrust vanishes. (author's abstract)
OriginalspracheEnglisch
ErscheinungsortVienna
HerausgeberWU Vienna University of Economics and Business
DOIs
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 2016

Publikationsreihe

ReiheDepartment of Economics Working Paper Series
Nummer212

WU Working Paper Reihe

  • Department of Economics Working Paper Series

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