A vast literature has investigated the relationship between trust and aggregate economic performance. We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs available...

When we take a cab we may feel cheated if the driver takes an unnecessarily long route despite the lack of a contract or promise to take the shortest possible path. Is our decision to take the cab affected by our belief that we may end up feeling cheated? Is the behavior of the driver affected...

Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming...

There is widespread concern among regulators that favoring suppliers with good past performance, a standard practice in private procurement, may hinder entry by new firms in public procurement markets. In this paper we report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship...

While strong social ties help individuals cope with missing institutions, trade is essentially limited to those who are part of the social network. We examine what makes the decision to trust a stranger different from the decision to trust a member of a given social network (a friend), by...

We study beliefs and choices in a repeated normal-form game. In addition to a baseline treatment with common knowledge of the game structure and feedback about choices in the previous period, we run treatments (i) without feedback about previous play, (ii) with no information about the...

While social relationships play an important role for individuals to cope with missing market institutions, they also limit individuals’ range of trading partners. This paper aims at under-standing the determinants of trust at various social distances when information asymmetries are present....

Among residents of an informal housing area in Cairo, we examine how dictator giving varies by the social distance between subjects – friend versus stranger – and by the anonymity of the dictator. While giving to strangers is high under anonymity, we find – consistent with Leider et al....