@TechReport{iza:izadps:dp7148,
            	author={Fehrler, Sebastian and Przepiorka, Wojtek},
            	title={Charitable Giving as a Signal of Trustworthiness: Disentangling the Signaling Benefits of Altruistic Acts},
            	year={2013},
	month={Jan},
            	institution={Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)},
            	address={Bonn},
            	type={IZA Discussion Paper},
            	number={7148},
            	url={https://www.iza.org/publications/dp7148},
	abstract={It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable quality that makes a person more attractive with regard to other types of social interactions. Here we show that if a proportion of individuals with social preferences is maintained in the population through kin or multi-level selection, cooperative acts that are truly altruistic can be a costly signal of social preferences and make altruistic individuals more trustworthy interaction partners in social exchange.
In a computerized laboratory experiment, we test whether altruistic behavior in the form of charitable giving is indeed correlated with trustworthiness and whether a charitable donation increases the observing agents' trust in the donor. Our results support these hypotheses and show that, apart from trust, responses to altruistic acts can have a rewarding or outcome-equalizing purpose. Our findings corroborate that the signaling benefits of altruistic acts that accrue in social exchange can ease the conditions for the evolution of social preferences.},
	keywords={trust;social preferences;costly signaling;evolution of cooperation;altruism;trustworthiness},
            }