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

Advanced search
Browse by:

Department | Year

UCL Theses | Latest

Deposit your research

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

Lo Iacono, Sergio; Sonmez, Burak; (2021) The Effect of Trusting and Trustworthy Environments on the Provision of Public Goods. European Sociological Review , 37 (1) pp. 155-168. 10.1093/esr/jcaa040. Green open access

Preview

PDF
esr.pdf - Published Version
Download (407kB) | Preview

Abstract

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.

Type:	Article
Title:	The Effect of Trusting and Trustworthy Environments on the Provision of Public Goods
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI:	10.1093/esr/jcaa040
Publisher version:	https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcaa040
Language:	English
Additional information:	VC The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
UCL classification:	UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10151052