Purpose

The purpose of this work is to experimentally measure trust and study its relationship to group loan allocation within a community bank.

Design/methodology/approach

An artefactual field experiment is run to capture a measure of trust that mimics aspects of trusting behavior in a community bank. The experimental design and empirical setting take into account risk and altruism, two known confounders of trust measures. Regression analysis is used to estimate the relationship between a novel measure of trust and the loan amount a borrower receives from their rural community bank.

Findings

The trust measure has a statistically significant, positive relationship with loan size. A one standard deviation increase in the trust measure corresponds to a 13.3 percent increase in the loan amount.

Social implications

Results of the study suggest that, for community banks, trust in a borrower plays a large role in screening applicants and therefore determining loan size. Several such banks have considered graduating to commercial credit. However, given the outsize role of trust in lending decisions, it is not clear if commercial lending models – which rely less on social capital – will work.

Originality/value

A new trust game is developed that captures relationship-specific measures of directed trust that community bank members have towards each borrower. The trust measure is also context-specific as play in the game is analogous to how community bank members trust some borrowers (more than others) with larger loans. The emphasis on relationship- and context-specific trust measures is key to interpreting results from artefactual field experiments.

中文翻译：

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重新访问传统的信任度量：使用人工现场实验来度量信任并预测小额贷款决策

目的

这项工作的目的是实验性地测量信任度，并研究其与社区银行中团体贷款分配的关系。

设计/方法/方法

进行人工仿真实验，以获取模仿社区银行信任行为各方面的信任程度。实验设计和经验设置考虑了风险和利他主义，这是两个已知的信任度量的混杂因素。回归分析用于估计新的信任度与借款人从其农村社区银行获得的贷款额之间的关系。

发现

信任度与贷款规模在统计上具有显着的正相关关系。信托计量中的一个标准差增加对应于贷款额的13.3％的增加。

社会影响

研究结果表明，对于社区银行而言，对借款人的信任在筛选申请人并因此确定贷款规模方面起着重要作用。几家这样的银行已考虑毕业于商业信贷。但是，鉴于信任在贷款决策中的巨大作用，目前尚不清楚商业贷款模式（较少依赖社会资本）是否会起作用。

创意/价值

开发了一个新的信任游戏，该游戏捕获了社区银行成员对每个借款人的针对关系的定向信任度量。信任度也取决于具体情况，因为游戏中的游戏类似于社区银行成员如何以更大的贷款来信任某些借款人（而不是其他借款人）。强调特定于关系和上下文的信任措施是解释人工现场实验结果的关键。