Gender and Culture: International Experimental Evidence From Trust Games

Gender is rarely included as a factor in economics models. However, recent work in experimental economics, as well as in psychology and political science, suggests that gender is an important determinant of economic and strategic behavior. We examine gender differences in bargaining using the ‘‘trust game’’ introduced by Joyce Berg et al. (1995). In this two-person game, the ‘‘proposer’’ is given a choice of sending some, all, or none of his or her $10 experimental payment to an anonymous partner, the ‘‘responder.’’ The experimenter triples any money sent. The responder then chooses how much of his or her total wealth (his or her $10 experimental payment plus the tripled money) to return to the proposer. Any money the responder does not return may be kept ( thus the responder is playing a dictator game with his or her endowment plus three times the amount the proposer sent ) . The unique subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium is for the proposer to send no money and for the responder to return none. For U.S. subjects, Berg et al. found that 30 of 32 proposers deviated from this economic equilibrium and sent some money to their partners ( the average amount sent was $5.16). In