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Weird reciprocity? A ‘within-culture across-country’ trust experiment and methodological implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2012

BJÖRN VOLLAN
BJÖRN VOLLAN*
Affiliation:
Leibniz Center for Marine Tropical Ecology (ZMT), Fahrenheitstrasse 6, D-28359 Bremen, Germany and University of Mannheim, Department of Economics, L7, 3–5, D-68131 Mannheim, Germany
*
*Email: bjoern.vollan@zmt-bremen.de
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Abstract:

Economic experiments carried out in the computer laboratory seldom account for broader real-world contextual variables that affect humans as learning and norm-adopting individuals. The here presented ‘within-culture across-country’ design of a standard trust experiment reveals an interesting phenomenon which most probably is related to the context that people live in: South African communities expressed extremely low trust while participants from Namibia exhibited high trust, but low reciprocity, although both share the same ethnic background. The country effect between the two regions remained large even after using a matching estimator to substantiate that these differences were not driven by sample selection bias. Qualitative evidence from the study area suggests that corrupt local institutions have led to lower trust in South African communities while participants in Namibia seemingly applied a deep-rooted behavioural norm of the Nama society which they perceived to be appropriate for the exchange in the experiment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 371 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2012

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Footnotes

This work was supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research (commission no. 01 LC 0024A). I greatly appreciate the logistic support of the BIOTA Southern Africa Project (Biodiversity Monitoring Transect Analysis) and thank Millie Saul, Richard Isaacks and Johanna Brüggemann for research assistance in the field and Lizande Kellerman for translating the instructions into Afrikaans. I received valuable comments from two anonymous reviewers, Bernd Hayo, Adam Henry, Michael Kirk, Andreas Landmann, Elinor Ostrom, Robert Poppe, Sebastian Prediger and Achim Schlüter. All remaining errors are of course mine.

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