Commitment to the truth creates trust in market exchange: Experimental evidence ☆

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jacquemet, Nicolas; Luchini, Stephane; Shogren, Jason F.; Zylbersztejn, Adam
• 署名单位: Paris School of Economics; Aix-Marseille Universite; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); University of Wyoming; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon (ENS de LYON); Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1; Universite Jean Monnet; Universite Lyon 2; emlyon business school
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.09.011
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 279-295
• 关键词: Trust game; COOPERATION; COMMUNICATION; COMMITMENT; deception; fine; Oath

摘要

Under incomplete contracts, the mutual belief in reciprocity facilitates how traders create value through economic exchange. Creating such beliefs among strangers can be challenging even when they are allowed to communicate, because communication is cheap. In this paper, we first extend the literature showing that a truth-telling oath increases honesty to a sequential trust game with pre-play, fixed-form, and cheap-talk communication. Our results confirm that the oath creates more trust and cooperative behavior thanks to an improvement in communication; but we also show that the oath induces selection into communication - it makes people more wary of using communication, precisely because communication speaks louder under oath. We next designed additional treatments featuring mild and deterrent fines for deception to measure the monetary equivalent of the non-monetary incentives implemented by a truth-telling oath. We find that the oath is behaviorally equivalent to mild fines. The deterrent fine induces the highest level of cooperation. Altogether, these results confirm that allowing for interactions under oath within a trust game with communication creates significantly more economic value than the identical exchange institutions without the oath.