Abstract
We employ a behavioral measure of trustworthiness obtained from a trust game carried out with a sample of the general British population, the individuals of which were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. Our basic finding is that given past income, higher current income increases trustworthiness and, given current income, higher past income reduces trustworthiness. Past income determines the level of financial aspirations, and whether or not these aspirations are fulfilled by the level of current income affects trustworthiness.
Highlights
We use a behavioral measure of trustworthiness, obtained from a "trust game" played by people from a previously surveyed sample of the general British population, to address a fundamental question, namely whether income affects trustworthiness: does higher income, whether in absolute or relative terms, make people more or less trustworthy?
Experiments are often administered to students, usually self-selected subjects, who are unrepresentative of the adult population and who possess important knowledge about the "strangers" with whom they are interacting—other students. They typically lack information on individual attributes needed to investigate the individual-level correlates of trustworthiness. We overcome both sets of limitations by exploiting an innovative design seldom used before (Fehr et al 2002) that combines the experimental method with the survey method: first, to elicit a behavioral measure of trustworthiness, we use a version of the so-called "trust game" described in detail in Ermisch et al (2009)
We present the main outcomes of the trust game, and the following three sections examine the main questions of the paper: how do economic resources affect trustworthiness in trust situations involving strangers
Summary
We use a behavioral measure of trustworthiness, obtained from a "trust game" played by people from a previously surveyed sample of the general British population, to address a fundamental question, namely whether income affects trustworthiness: does higher income, whether in absolute or relative terms, make people more or less trustworthy?
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