Reciprocity effects in the trust game

Abstract

I use data from a previous experiment for classifying subjects based on their behavior in the trust game. Prior literature defines a "reciprocity effect" as the tendency for Second Movers to return proportions increasing in the amounts that they receive. In the data that I use, 31% of Second Movers show reciprocity effects, 31% are neutral, and 25% consistently free-ride, indicating that the aggregate reciprocity effect for the sample as a whole is attributable to a minority of the subjects. © 2013 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.