Studying the Robustness of the Triadic Trust Design with Mechanical Turk Subjects

Abstract

This paper uses subjects recruited from an online employment exchange to study the robustness of the triadic trust design with a different subject pool. In running our experiments we tried to take advantage of the cost reducing features of the micro-employment culture found on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We find that first mover trust is robust to the change in subject pool, but second mover reciprocity was not.

Keywords: Trust, Reciprocity, Dictator Giving, Mechanical Turk, Triadic Trust Design

JEL Classification: C99, D31, D64