市场是否挤出了信任:一个来自实验经济学的考察

Does Market Crowd Out Trust:An Experimental Investigation

市场是否挤出了信任是社会科学共同关注的一个基础性问题。本文运用信息不对称的经验品模型模拟了“有市场”环境,同时运用组内设计和数据平移创造性地设计了一个博弈结构完全相同的模型来刻画“无市场”环境,并设置了七个实验局分别剥离了市场中的语言描述、消费者选择权、商家定价权三个要素,从而全面对比了“有市场”与“无市场”时信任水平的差异。实验结果表明:首先,市场能够有效提升信任水平,市场与信任可形成正反馈,这进一步凸显了市场在资源配置中的决定性作用;其次,消费者选择权与商家定价权所发挥的作用并不对称,其中消费者选择权是关键因素,保护消费者权益对于构建一个良性有效率的市场尤为重要;再次,声誉是消费者选择权促进信任水平提升的重要渠道。本文加深了我们对市场自由竞争本质以及市场机制运行的理解,并为我国的市场化改革提供了重要启示:要尊重市场运行规律、强化竞争政策基础地位、保障消费者权益。

The research question of this paper is:Does the market crowd out people's trust?Which characteristics of the market influence people's trust?Causally addressing these questions requires comparing the differences in trust between environments with and without markets.However,it is difficult to obtain empirical data on the no-market environment.Experimental methods provide a new solution,thanks to a no-market scenario we can simulate in the laboratory.The experimental design faces two challenges.First,what type of game can characterize both the market and trust?We adopt the trust game in experience goods markets,where firms know the quality of the goods they sell,but consumers do not know the quality before purchasing.The information asymmetry makes trust crucial in experience goods markets,which is why we choose it as our baseline game.Second,how can we define the market or characterize its features?We view competition as the core of the market.Based on decentralized mechanism of market rights,we further decompose free competition into two aspects:(1)consumer choice:consumers have the right to freely choose the goods they trade;(2)seller pricing power:sellers in the market have the right to set prices for their goods.Finally,we consider the market narrative as another characteristic of the market.Following the above research pipeline,we use the trust game in experience goods markets as the“market”environment,and create a similar game structure as the“no-market”environment,thereby comparing the differences in trust.The“no-market”environment lacks features such as consumer choice,seller pricing power,or market narrative.We set up treatments that remove single,double,or triple features to analyze the individual and combined effects of market features on trust.We also use within-subject design and data migrating techniques to make sure the decision environment is completely replicated,with only the presence or absence of the market features changing.Our results indicate that the market does not crowd out people's trust.The impact of consumer choice and seller pricing power on trust is asymmetric,with consumer choice playing a crucial role.Additional mediation analysis shows that reputation is an important channel in how market factors determining people's trust.