@techreport{8156f2af731d49e9a6013f363147656f,
title = "Microfoundations of Social Capital",
abstract = "We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide a microfoundation for this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark and find that the trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others{\textquoteright} cooperation. To disentangle the preference and belief channels, we run a (standard) public goods game in which beliefs matter for cooperation choices and one (using the strategy method) in which they do not matter. We show that the “fairness question”, a recently proposed alternative to the “trust question”, is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.",
keywords = "social capital, trust, fairness, public goods, cooperation, experiment",
author = "Christian Th{\"o}ni and Jean-Robert Tyran and Erik Wengstr{\"o}m",
year = "2009",
month = oct,
day = "22",
doi = "10.2139/ssrn.1491500",
language = "English",
series = "Univ. of Copenhagen Dept. of Economics Discussion Paper",
number = "09-24",
type = "WorkingPaper",
}