Almost all economic and public choice models assume that all people are exclusively pursuing their own material self-interests and do not care about "social" goals per se. Several (laboratory) experiments address the question of the general validity of this assumption. A consistent conclusion...

We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Heterogeneity of trust beliefs in the population, coupled with the tendency of individuals to extrapolate...