Declining general trust has become a serious social issue in China in recent years. This paper attempts to understand and analyze this social phenomenon from a social interaction perspective. Based on a repeated prisoners´ dilemma game on networks, it finds that the evolution of general trust...

We study the functioning of informal value transfer systems (IVTS) with the example of Hawala. More precisely, we use computational experiments to study the roles of generalized trust and social control for the stability and efficiency of IVTS. Previous literature was ambiguous with regard to:...

Transaction cost economics explains organizations in a market vs. hierarchy dichotomy. In this view, complex real-world coordination forms are simply considered hybrids of those pure and ideal forms. This organizational dichotomy is mainly based on relative marginal transaction costs and...