The Effect of Trusting and Trustworthy Environments on the Provision of Public Goods

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2234790
AutoresSergio Lo Iacono (0000-0001-7316-5162, Department of Sociology, University of Utrecht, Padualaan 14, Utrecht 3584 CH, Netherlands, autor correspondente), Burak Sonmez (0000-0002-2335-566X, University of Essex)
Ano2021
Volume37
Fascículo1
Páginas155-168
Data de publicação2021-01-30
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEuropean Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0266-7215 • E-ISSN: 1468-2672
EditoraOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/esr/jcaa040
OpenAlexW3102551447
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas47

Trusting and trustworthy environments are argued to promote collective action, as people learn to rely on their fellow citizens and believe that only few individuals will free ride. To test the causal validity of this mechanism, we propose an experimental design that allows us to create different trusting and trustworthy conditions simply by (i) manipulating the incentive structure of an iterated binary trust game and (ii) allowing information to flow among participants. Findings indicate that, given a similar distribution of resources among subjects, trusting and trustworthy environments strongly foster the provision of public goods. This outcome is largely driven by a learning effect: subjects transfer what they assimilate during a sequence of dyadic exchanges to their decision to act for the collectivity. In particular, results showed that what we learn from the community has a relevant effect on our ability to overcome the free-rider problem: we are more likely to act for the collectivity when we learn from the community to be trustful or reliable in our one-to-one interactions. The same applies in the opposite direction: we are more prone to free ride when we learn from the environment to be distrustful or unreliable in our dyadic exchanges

Action (physics) · Business · Collective action · Economics · Free rider problem · Free riding · Incentive · Internet privacy · Iterated function · Law and economics · Microeconomics · Political science · Public good · Public goods game · Public relations · Trustworthiness · Computer Science · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Law · Mathematics · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Psychology · Social Psychology

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