Social distance in a virtual world experiment

Trust among the Avatars: A Virtual World Experiment, with and without Textual and Visual Cues

“…These proportions are considerably higher than the 33.3% that causes the first‐mover to break even, higher than the 29.8% average proportion returned by BDM's subjects, and above most other results in the literature, including BDM's “social history” treatment (37.1%) and the average of over Tanzanian and Swedish subject pools (35.8%). The difference with our subjects' 47.4% average return proportion is smaller, however, in some studies: the base treatment of (40.0%), the result in (43.7%), and the proportion returned by second‐mover recipients of positive amounts in the Control 3 treatment of (41.7%), all showing that returns above the break‐even level are not so uncommon . The greater degree of reciprocity evinced by our subjects might be partly attributable to lower real‐money stakes, but it is still remarkable in view of the importance subjects report that they attached to earning Lindens as a motivator of their participation, and especially given the unusually high degree of anonymity both among players and between players and experimenters.…”

“…Considering first behaviors in the BASELINE treatment and average behaviors in the experiment as a whole, we note that the proportion of endowment sent by BASELINE treatment subjects lies only slightly below the average proportion sent in all treatments combined, 51.8%, and that this is remarkably similar to the proportion sent by BDM's subjects, 51.6%. It likewise resembles the amounts sent in other one‐shot trust game experiments having the same payoff structure, such as (53.0%), (46.8%), and (52.2%), as well as the proportion of a L$1000 endowment sent by control treatment subjects of (53.4%) . There is no indication here that smaller stakes, a more diverse subject pool, or a virtual environment alter average first‐mover behavior in our experiment.…”

“…Unlike our experiment and BDM, Chesney, Fiedler, and Li (2009) paid their subjects show‐up fees separate from the game payoffs and did not match the initial L$1000 given to A with any such grant to B. Unlike our experiment and BDM, in and Fiedler et al (2008) B players could send their counterparts not only any portion of their tripled receipts but also their initial endowment (which as in BDM and our experiment, is the same as the endowment of A players).…”

“… report play of a number of familiar games, including the dictator game, the ultimatum game, and the public goods game, and find subject behaviors closely resembling those in conventional labs. The subjects in ; ; and play trust games following in‐world communication with prospective partners, and the latter article includes a control treatment without communication . The subjects in the virtual environment condition in play a version of the trust game in Second Life in sessions in which the avatars of potential counterparts sit in a large virtual lab room separated by modest partitions.…”

Financial competence, overconfidence, and trusting investments: Results from an experiment

“…For example, McCannon (2014a) considers how behavior relates to subject's preferences for economic freedom. It has been given as an assessment in villages in Zimbabwe (Barr 2003), comparison of trust in Sweden and Tanzania (Holm and Danielson 2005), cross-country comparisons of behavior (Buchan et al 2002), identification of gender differences across countries (Croson and Buchan 1999), investigation of behavior in virtual worlds (Fiedler et al 2011), impact of an economics (McCannon 2014b) and finance education (McCannon and Peterson 2015), and as a tool to appreciate preferences of those in madrassas, Islamic colleges, and liberal universities in Pakistan (Delavande and Zafar 2011). In short, the Trust Game is a common tool used to assess social interaction.…”