Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises in-crease cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The goals of this paper are to examine messages under a...

This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust in a relationship. 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...

Charness and Dufwenberg (2006) find that promises increase cooperation and suggest that the behavior of subjects in their experiment is driven by guilt aversion. By modifying the procedures to include a double blind social distance protocol we test an alternative explanation that promise keeping...

Should one use words or money to foster trust of the other party if no means of enforcing trustworthiness are available? This paper reports an experiment studying the effectiveness of two types of mechanisms for promoting trust: a costly gift and a costless message as well as their mutual...

This paper uses the 2005 and 2006 China General Social Survey (CGSS) to study the relationship between social capital and health in China. Using four separate samples totalling over 18,000 respondents and some methodological innovations that are new to the social capital literature, we identify...

Previous research has suggested that communication and especially promises increase cooperation in laboratory experiments. This has been taken as evidence for internal motivations such as guilt aversion or preference for promise keeping. The original goal of this paper was to examine promises...