Building Trust One Gift at a Time

Building Trust - One Gift at a Time

This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the trustor before both of them proceed to play the investment game. We observe that in such case the majority of trustees offer...

Building communities one bacterium at a time.

T he biosphere is brimming with examples of symbiotic interactions between distantly related organisms that have evolved mutually beneficial relationships to ensure their survival. One might assume that there are many examples of syntrophic interactions among microorganisms because of their diversity and abundance (1, 2). Remarkably few cases between 2 or more microbial species have been descri...

Building relationships--one patient at a time.

Putting Trust into E-commerce - One Page at a Time*

One of the most important phenomena in E-Commerce is trust customers are unlikely to complete transactions if they do not trust the web site they are using. Much thought has been given to aspects of buyer-seller trust in the area of how much the seller trusts the buyer, or at least how to ensure ‘trust.’ However, to date there has been little headway into the concept of how much buyers trust se...

Trust and Distrust Definitions: One Bite at a Time

Researchers have remarked and recoiled at the literature confusion regarding the meanings of trust and distrust. The problem involves both the proliferation of narrow intra-disciplinary research definitions of trust and the multiple meanings the word trust possesses in everyday use. To enable trust researchers to more easily compare empirical results, we define a cohesive set of conceptual and ...