Reading focus
Syllabus: Why Do People Help and Cooperate?
Use the cooperation framework to distinguish a risky transfer, expected repayment, and unconditional giving.
Why you’re reading it. Learn why an experimental task's familiar name does not uniquely identify the process producing a decision.
A question to consider. What additional comparison would help determine whether a sender transfers money because they expect a return or because they value the receiver's gain?
Why this reading
The investment game creates an opportunity for mutual gain that depends on another person's response. Its simplicity makes it useful for asking both what people do and how much an observed transfer can tell us about trust or reciprocity.
Before you read
A sender can transfer money that is multiplied before reaching a receiver, who can return some of it. The one-shot, anonymous design limits opportunities to build a personal reputation. The prediction of no transfer depends on assumptions about self-regarding preferences as well as strategic reasoning; it is not a prediction of all possible economic models.
Read for
- Work through the available choices and payoffs before interpreting the amount sent or returned.
- Separate the no-history condition from the condition providing information about earlier participants. Social history is information about others, not repeated play with the same partner.
- Compare the variation in individual decisions with the averages and the strength of the statistical comparisons.
Consider afterwards
- Could a sender transfer money without expecting anything back? What would that imply about calling the transfer a pure measure of trust?
- How could a comparison preserve the receiver's available allocations while removing the sender's intentional act?
Editorial context
The behavior challenges the joint assumptions behind the narrowly self-regarding prediction. It does not identify a single motive for each participant. Cox (2004) adds comparison games to distinguish conditional trust and reciprocity from unconditional concern for others. Differences between games still depend on what participants understand and on which features the comparison holds constant.