Testing the Trust Game with undergraduates: An experiment with wealth heterogeneity

Abstract

Trust, reciprocity and a fair distribution of resources are cruzial in the sustainabhility of any economic system. As a matter of fact, those are values that should be promoted among the new generations, especially among university students enroled indegrees tha are related to economics.Under this context, we are interested in enhancing criticism and active reflectionamong undergraduates with respect to social values. With such a goal in mind, we design a two step classroom task that includes playing the Trust Game (TG) in the first place and, second, a discussion activity.This paper is an ext5ension of Caballer-Tarazona et al. (2016) with a novelty: A new treatment is introduced in which subjects have information about the cumulated wealth of their partners.As a complement of the educational propose of the task, data collected during the experiment has been used to test the three hypotheses on trust and reciprocity among students.Two main result emerge: First, information has no effect on trust and reciprocity decisions. And second, in median, a gender effect in such decision is found.