Corporate Trust Games in Modern Knowledge Economies

Abstract

Over the past decade developments in game theory and experimental games have made trust games very popular. Their success depends also on the fact that they represent an interesting benchmark for testing the anthropological restrictions that mainstream economics poses on the behaviour of economic agents. Following the well-known reference of Sen (1977), the identification of (myopic) self-interest as the unique driver of human action makes economic agents ‘rational fouls’ and rules out at least other two fundamental motivations of human behaviour: ‘sympathy’ and ‘commitment’. With the former we may make choices that are not in our self-interest, but in that of individuals or groups that we care for. With the latter we perform actions that do not maximize our direct goals but that are consistent with the fulfilment of some duties based on internal acknowledged laws. Some of the mainstream theorists often think that these additional motivations of human behaviour may be easily incorporated into standard modelling with the direct inclusion into the individual’s utility function or with the incorporation in some kind of ad hoc contingent goods (i.e. care for relational goods may be incorporated in a higher demand for recreational places which are more efficient in promoting interpersonal exchanges).

CEIS Working Paper no. 233, presented at the 2006 Conference of the European Association for Research on Industrial Economics (EARIE) in Amsterdam, at the 2006 Conference of the AIEL (Italian Association of Labour Economics) in Udine, at the 2006 CORE conference organised by Fondazione ‘Mattei’ in Milan and at the 2006 workshop on ‘CSR and Corporate Governance’ of the International Economic Association. The authors thank Luciano Andreozzi, Masahiko Aoki, Avner Ben Ner, Bruce Chapman, Allen Kaufman, Bruno Frey, Lorenzo Sacconi, Margit Osterloh, Alessandro Vercelli, Oliver Williamson and all other participants to these conferences for their comments and suggestions. A special thanks to Annalisa Luporini for her precious suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.