The effects of personality, risk and other-regarding attitudes on trust and reciprocity

This paper reports experimental results on the determinants of trust and reciprocity in the context of a genuinely sequential, binary Trust Game. Apart from behavior in the main experiment, subjects' risk attitudes and inequality aversion are elicited, as well as the traits of neuroticism and agreeableness, captured through the fivefactor model. The findings suggest that trustors' (first movers) behavior is affected by their loss aversion, while trustees' (second movers) reciprocal behavior is not explained by any of their other-regarding attitudes, but, rather, by their agreeableness.