Altruism and Gender in the Trust Game

This paper analyses gender differences in the trust game. Our experiment implements the triadic design proposed by Cox (2004) to discriminate between transfers resulting from trust or trustworthiness and transfers resulting from altruistic preferences. We observe that women exhibit a higher degree of altruism than men for both trust and trustworthiness but relatively more for trustworthiness. This result provides an explanation to the experimental finding that women reciprocate more than men.