Testing Guilt Aversion

Publisert i

Games and Economic Behavior 68 (1), 2010, pages 95-107

Sammendrag

Guilt averse individuals experience a utility loss if they believe they let someone down. For example, generosity depends on what the donor believes that the recipient expects to receive. We measure guilt aversion in three separate experiments: a dictator game experiment, a complete information trust game experiment, and a hidden action trust game experiment. In the experiments we inform donors about the beliefs of the matched recipients, while eliciting these beliefs so as to maximize recipient honesty. The correlation between generous behavior and elicited beliefs is close to zero in all three experiments, suggesting that guilt aversion is smaller than previously thought.

Fulltekst

By Magnus Johannesson, Tore Ellingsen, Sigve Tjøtta and Gaute Torsvik
Published June 22, 2011 2:59 PM - Last modified May 31, 2012 1:33 PM