'Until not much more than 20 years ago, economists frequently lamented the fact that they were limited in their empirical analyses to statistical assessments of market behavior, because controlled economic experiments were (thought to be) infeasible, unethical, or both. Much has changed in the...

This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the trustor before both of...