Microfoundations of Social Capital

TY - UNPB

T1 - Microfoundations of Social Capital

AU - Thöni, Christian

AU - Tyran, Jean-Robert

AU - Wengström, Erik Roland

N1 - JEL classification: H41, C91, C72

PY - 2009

Y1 - 2009

N2 - We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide a microfoundation for this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark and find that the trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others' cooperation. To disentangle the preference and belief channels, we run a (standard) public goods game in which beliefs matter for cooperation choices and one (using the strategy method) in which they do not matter. We show that the "fairness question", a recently proposed alternative to the "trust question", is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.

AB - We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide a microfoundation for this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark and find that the trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others' cooperation. To disentangle the preference and belief channels, we run a (standard) public goods game in which beliefs matter for cooperation choices and one (using the strategy method) in which they do not matter. We show that the "fairness question", a recently proposed alternative to the "trust question", is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - trust

KW - fairness

KW - public goods

KW - cooperation

KW - experiment

M3 - Working paper

BT - Microfoundations of Social Capital

PB - Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

ER -