116,762 research outputs found
On the relational aspects of trust and trustworthiness: results from a laboratory experiment
Do we trust better-connected people more than others and are those who are better connected more trustworthy? Interaction in social networks affects trust as it helps reduce informational asymmetries and identify those whom to trust. It also provides channels for reciprocity where trustworthiness emerges as a relational rather than individual characteristic. We run a laboratory experiment in which trustors decide on how to allocate their endowment to five trustees both before and after a network formation phase. Our results show that trustors are influenced by the behaviour of trustees in the network formation phase: when the allocation is chosen after networks have been formed, trust is directed towards the most frequent connections of the trustor. However, when trustors' offers are anonymous, such increased trust is not reciprocated by trustees. This suggests that social connections do not signal a greater individual propensity to reciprocate trust, but rather provide channels for reciprocity which can only be activated when both trust and trustworthiness are not anonymous
Schools, communities and social capital: building blocks in the 'Big Society' (Research associate full report)
"This study looked at how effective schools engage with their communities. Its aim was to identify key
mechanisms that promoted community engagement. It also sought to determine the impact this had on the
amount and nature of social capital available to pupils, parents and the wider community. Effective schools
were found to generate significant amounts of social capital within their institutions as demonstrated by the
degree of trust, reciprocity, civic engagement and social cohesion. Pupil voice was a powerful mechanism in
developing a sense of control and self-efficacy. Recently created posts such as family workers, therapists and
social work placements extended much of this impact into the family.
Schools that went further to promote social capital in the neighbourhood were those with a more
aspirational vision that went beyond simply engaging the community to aid school improvement. They
viewed community empowerment as key to the success of their pupils and families within the wider social
context. They encouraged community leadership and decision-making, often through informal learning
approaches, and truly became âhubs of the communityâ, facilitating community development and promoting
community cohesion. The findings suggest that a more reciprocal view is needed of the relationship between
school and community and that schools could play a central role in creating the âBig Societyâ.
The Instrumental Value Arguments for National Self-Determination
David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Millerâs arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument âinstrumental valueâ arguments. In this paper, I examine the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a groupâs right to self-determination
Incentivising Trust
We argue that trust can be incentivised by measures which increase the ability of trusters to protect themselves against risk. We work within the framework originally established by Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe (1995) in which trust is measured experimentally as the ability to generate reciprocity in response to an initial offer of money within a two-person game. An incentive is conveyed both by means of variations in the multiplier applied to the first playerÂŽs initial offer and by giving the first player the opportunity to insure themselves against the possibility that the second player will fail to reciprocate their initial offer. Measured trust is strongly responsive to both these incentives. Thus third parties have the ability to influence the outcome of the game, not only, as in the analysis of Charness et al (2008), by punishing failure to reciprocate and rewarding `goodÂŽ initial offers, but also by offering protection which strengthens the first playerÂŽs risk efficacy, or ratio of assets to risk
Empathy, Asymmetrical Reciprocity, and the Ethics of Mental Health Care
I discuss Youngâs âasymmetrical reciprocityâ and apply it to an ethics of mental health
care. Due to its emphasis on engaging with others through respectful dialogue in an inclusive
manner, asymmetrical reciprocity serves as an appropriate framework for guiding caregivers to
interact with their patients and to understand them in a morally responsible and appropriate
manner. In Section 1, I define empathy and explain its benefits in the context of mental health care.
In Section 2, I discuss two potential problems surrounding empathy: the difficulty of perspectivetaking
and âcompassion fatigue.â In Section 3, I argue that these issues can be resolved if examined
through the lens of an ethics of care. Reciprocal relationships between patients and caregivers are
an important element in the development of an ethics of care. In Section 4, I introduce two models
of reciprocity that can be applied to a health care context: Benhabibâs symmetrical reciprocity and
Youngâs asymmetrical reciprocity. In Section 5, I demonstrate how asymmetrical reciprocity
cultivates empathy and, in Section 6 and Section 7, I show how it overcomes the objections of
empathy and improves therapeutic relationships
The role of playersâ identification in the population on the trusting and the trustworthy behavior an experimental investigation
We study to what extent identification does matter for trustfulness and trustworthiness to emerge in a population of players. Our experimen- tal protocol is designed for isolating the effects of trusteesâ identification. Trusteesâ identification is a necessary condition for introducing a reputation mechanism. We run three treatments. In each treatment groups 6 players interact repeatedly and randomly and play a 30 periods investment game (Berg & al. 1995). In the first treatment players canât identify each other, in the second one players can identify each other as trustee and in the third one players identify each other both as trustee and trustor. We show that, according to the expectation, trusteesâ identification has a positive effect on reciprocity. However it doesnât affect the average trust in the population. Trust is significantly higher than in the complete anonymous treatment only when players identify each other in both roles. We show that this enhance of trust is the result of mutual trust-reciprocity relationships formation.
Rehabilitation and social behavior: Experiments in prison
Despite the economic and social significance of crime reduction and criminalsâ rehabilitation, research evaluating the effects of incarceration on behavior is surprisingly scarce. We conduct an experiment with 105 prison inmates and complement it with administrative data in order to explore several aspects of their social behavior. We first perform a comprehensive analysis of behavior in three economic games, finding evidence of discrimination against a sample from outside prison. In addition, our regression analysis reveals that inmates generally become less pro-social towards this out-group the longer they remain incarcerated. Finally, we introduce and evaluate a priming intervention that asks inmates to reflect on their time spent in prison. This intervention has a very sizeable and significant impact, increasing pro-sociality towards the out-group. Hence, a simple, low-cost intervention of this sort can have desirable effects in promoting rehabilitation and integration into social and economic life after release
Why Trust Out-groups? The Role of Punishment Under Uncertainty
We conducted a hidden-effort trust game, in which we assigned subjects to one of two groups. The groups, which were formed through two different group formation processes, included a âsocialâ group that required sharing and exchange among its members, and a ânon-socialâ group that did not. Once assigned, subjects participated in the game with members from both groups, either with or without the opportunity to punish a trustee who may have defected on them. We found that for investors in the non-social group, the opportunity to punish a trustee worked to promote trust, but only when the trustee was a member of the other group. For the social group, the opportunity to punish had no effect on the investorsâ trust decisions, regardless of the trustee\u27s group. We provide a theoretical framework to explain this asymmetric effect of punishment on trust. Our results suggest that groups with identities founded in sharing and exchangeâa feature of globalized societiesâmay find it less necessary to engage in costly punishment. As a result, they may enjoy gains in economic efficiency
Coevolution of trustful buyers and cooperative sellers in the trust game
Many online marketplaces enjoy great success. Buyers and sellers in
successful markets carry out cooperative transactions even if they do not know
each other in advance and a moral hazard exists. An indispensable component
that enables cooperation in such social dilemma situations is the reputation
system. Under the reputation system, a buyer can avoid transacting with a
seller with a bad reputation. A transaction in online marketplaces is better
modeled by the trust game than other social dilemma games, including the
donation game and the prisoner's dilemma. In addition, most individuals
participate mostly as buyers or sellers; each individual does not play the two
roles with equal probability. Although the reputation mechanism is known to be
able to remove the moral hazard in games with asymmetric roles, competition
between different strategies and population dynamics of such a game are not
sufficiently understood. On the other hand, existing models of reputation-based
cooperation, also known as indirect reciprocity, are based on the symmetric
donation game. We analyze the trust game with two fixed roles, where trustees
(i.e., sellers) but not investors (i.e., buyers) possess reputation scores. We
study the equilibria and the replicator dynamics of the game. We show that the
reputation mechanism enables cooperation between unacquainted buyers and
sellers under fairly generous conditions, even when such a cooperative
equilibrium coexists with an asocial equilibrium in which buyers do not buy and
sellers cheat. In addition, we show that not many buyers may care about the
seller's reputation under cooperative equilibrium. Buyers' trusting behavior
and sellers' reputation-driven cooperative behavior coevolve to alleviate the
social dilemma.Comment: 5 figure
Screening, Competition, and Job Design
In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These âhigh-performance work systemsâ are difficult
to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these new forms of work organization. We document in particular the endogenous emergence of two fundamentally distinct types of employment strategies. Employers either implement a control strategy, which consists of low effort discretion and little or no rent-sharing, or they implement a trust strategy, which stipulates high effort discretion and substantial rent-sharing. If employers cannot screen employees, the control strategy prevails, while the possibility of screening renders the trust strategy profitable. The introduction of competition substantially fosters the trust strategy, reduces market segmentation, and leads to large welfare gains for both employers and employees
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