Till We Have Red Faces: Drinking to Signal Trustworthiness in Contemporary China
Public Choice, ISSN: 1573-7101
2024
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Example: if you select the 1-year option for an article published in 2019 and a metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019. If you select the 3-year option for the same article published in 2019 and the metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
Citation Benchmarking is provided by Scopus and SciVal and is different from the metrics context provided by PlumX Metrics.
Article Description
Interpersonal networks facilitate business cooperation and socioeconomic exchange. But how can outsiders demonstrate their trustworthiness to join existing networks? Focusing on the puzzling yet common phenomenon of heavy drinking at China’s business banquets, we argue that this costly practice can be a rational strategy intentionally used by entrants to signal trustworthiness to potential business partners. Because drinking alcohol can lower one’s inhibitions and reveal one’s true self, entrants intentionally drink heavily to show that they have nothing to hide and signal their sincere commitment to cooperation. This signaling effect is enhanced if the entrants have low alcohol tolerance, as their physical reactions to alcohol (e.g., red face) make their drunkenness easier to verify. Our theory of heavy social drinking is substantiated by both ethnographic fieldwork and a discrete-choice experiment on Chinese entrepreneurs. This research illuminates how trust can be built absent sufficient support from formal institutions.
Bibliographic Details
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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