Microfoundations of social capital

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Thoeni, Christian; Tyran, Jean-Robert; Wengstrom, Erik
• 署名单位: University of Copenhagen; University of Lausanne; University of Vienna; Lund University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2012.04.003
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 635-643
• 关键词: Social capital; trust; fairness; public goods; COOPERATION; experiment

摘要

Research on social capital routinely relies on survey measures of trust which can be collected in large and heterogeneous samples at low cost. We validate such survey measures in an incentivized public good experiment and show that they are importantly related to cooperation behavior in a large and heterogeneous sample. We provide evidence on the microfoundation of this relation by use of an experimental design that enables us to disentangle preferences for cooperation from beliefs about others' cooperation. Our analysis suggests that the standard trust question used in the World Values Survey is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others' cooperation. In contrast, the fairness question, a recently proposed alternative to the standard trust question, seems to operate through beliefs rather than preferences. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved,