Trust plays a fundamental role in economic exchanges, particularly in environments where a person does not know the actions of another or have less than full information. The trust game by Berg et al (1995) provides one of the most important media for studying trust. The trust game showed that people deviate from economic models that predict that people do things for purely self interest and for rational reasons. My research builds on previous literature by examining a previously unexplored area: whether the origin of the investor's wealth influences their trust behavior. Specifically, we examined whether earning an endowment increases the perceived ownership of that money and therefore reduces the investor's willingness to give that money to another person. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the "earn" condition, participants complete a task and are told they earned a $3.00 endowment because of their performance. In the "given" condition, participants complete the same task but are told the $3.00 is for a separate task they are completing. Participants then played a round of the trust game as the investor and chose how much to send to the trustee in increments of $0.50. I hypothesize that the participants in the "earn" condition will send significantly less.
Acknowledgements: SRG Grant & E. Dwight Phaup Memorial Fund