Trust Games

Author(s):  
Vincent Buskens ◽  
Vincenz Frey ◽  
Werner Raub

This article offers an overview of different variants of trust games and shows how game-theoretic modeling can contribute to an analysis of conditions for placing and honoring trust in such games. The focus is on explaining trust rather than on explaining consequences of trust for individual behavior or for outcomes such as societal cohesion or economic prosperity. Specifically, game-theoretic modeling allows for analyzing how the “embeddedness” of trust games in long-term relations between actors and in networks of relations can be a basis for informal norms and institutions of trust. Game-theoretic modeling also allows for analyzing actors’ incentives to modify embeddedness characteristics so that informal norms and institutions of trust become feasible. We discuss how game-theoretic models can be used to derive testable predictions for experiments with trust games and sketch empirical evidence from such experiments.

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Greiff ◽  
Henrik Egbert

Abstract This paper introduces the Pay-What-You-Want game which represents the interaction between a buyer and a seller in a Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) situation. The PWYW game embeds the dictator game and the trust game as subgames. This allows us to use previous experimental studies with the dictator and the trust game to identify three factors that can influence the success of PWYW pricing in business practice: (i) social context, (ii) social information, and (iii) deservingness. Only few cases of PWYW pricing for a longer period of time have been documented. By addressing repeated games, we isolate two additional factors which are likely to contribute to successful implementations of PWYW as a long term pricing strategy. These are (iv) communication and (v) the reduction of goal conflicts. The central contribution of this study is an attempt to bridge the gap between laboratory experiments and the research on PWYW pricing, which relies largely on evidence from the field. By reviewing the relevant experiments, this study identifies factors crucial for the success of PWYW pricing and provides guidance to developing long-term applications of PWYW pricing.


Author(s):  
Tai-Yuan Chen ◽  
Kai Wai Hui ◽  
Steven R. Matsunaga ◽  
Yong Zhang

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110072
Author(s):  
Ramon van der Does ◽  
Vincent Jacquet

Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for future research.


Energy Policy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (10) ◽  
pp. 5671-5683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikos K. Nomikos ◽  
Orestes A. Soldatos

2021 ◽  
pp. 096372142110538
Author(s):  
Wendy Johnson

Increasingly, we are required, encouraged, and/or motivated to track our behavior, presumably to improve our life “quality.” But health and life-satisfaction trends are not cooperating: Empirical evidence for success is sorely lacking. Intelligence has been tracked for more than 100 years; perhaps this example offers some hints about tracking’s overall social impact. I suggest that Huxley’s Brave New World offers a relevant long-term extrapolation and that popular recent tracking activities will accelerate “progress” in that dystopian direction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Collins ◽  
Ion Juvina

The literature on trust seems to have reached a consensus that appropriately calibrated trust in humans or machines is highly desirable; miscalibrated (i.e., over- or under-) trust has been thought to only have negative consequences (i.e., over-reliance or under-utilization). While not invalidating the general idea of trust calibration, a published computational cognitive model of trust in strategic interaction predicts that some local and temporary violations of the trust calibration principle are critical for sustained success in strategic situations characterized by interdependence and uncertainty (e.g., trust game, prisoner’s dilemma, and Hawk-dove). This paper presents empirical and computational modeling work aimed at testing the predictions of under- and over-trust in an extension of the trust game, the multi-arm trust game, that captures some important characteristics of real-world interpersonal and human-machine interactions, such as the ability to choose when and with whom to interact among multiple agents. As predicted by our previous model, we found that, under conditions of increased trust necessity, participants actively reconstructed their trust-investment portfolios by discounting their trust in their previously trusted counterparts and attempting to develop trust with the counterparts that they previously distrusted. We argue that studying these exceptions of the principle of trust calibration might be critical for understanding long-term trust calibration in dynamic environments.


Author(s):  
Duane Windsor

This chapter identifies some game-theoretic insights concerning several key issues of business ethics typically occurring in emerging economies. The chapter explicates four elements in this sequence: nature of game theory, characteristics of emerging economies, fundamentals of business ethics, and key business ethics issues. The chapter emphasizes useful insights of game theory rather than undertaking formal modeling (examples are noted in references). Game theory assists reasoning about strategic scenarios for businesses. A multinational entity operates within layers of institutions and norms from the international to the national and sub-national levels. Such institutions and norms help structure the complex environment within which a multinational entity operates. The approach in this chapter is to inquire into certain specific decision scenarios available in the extant literature as instances of important classes of decision problems and to suggest game-theoretic responses. These scenarios concern long-term sustainable business models, corporate values, and corporate reputation.


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