Review of: The Limits of Public Choice. A Sociological Critique of the Economic Theory of Politics. By Lars Udehn. 1996. Routledge: London

This paper examines whether trust is an investment decision under uncertainty, based on the expectation of trustworthiness, and whether trustworthiness is reciprocity, conditional on one's counterpart's behavior. In experiments run in Russia, South Africa and the United States, we find that only...

Besides deterring people, laws may affect behavior by changing preferences or beliefs. A law may elicit intrinsic motivation by framing an act as wrong. Alternatively, it may coordinate the behavior of different people by changing their beliefs about what others will do. We investigate framing...

Due to betrayal aversion, people take risks less willingly when the agent of uncertainty is another person rather than nature. Individuals in six countries (Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States) confronted a binary-choice trust game or a risky decision offering the...

"Norms of reciprocity help enforce cooperative agreements in bilateral sequential exchange. We examine the norms that apply in a reciprocal-exchange economy. In our one-shot investment game in a Nairobi slum, people adhered to the norm of "balanced reciprocity," which obligates quid-pro-quo...

This paper employs experiments to determine how effectively arrangements decreasing the expected cost of trust betrayal foster trust in three Gulf countries (Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates), and two Western countries (Switzerland and the United States). Our basic instrument elicits...

Referenda and initiatives are hardly considered as democratic devices for a future Europe. Drawing on experimental evidence and empirical findings for Switzerland, the authors argue that direct democracy performs well for the provision of public goods and redistribution as it institutionalizes...

Using experiments, we examine whether the decision to trust a stranger in a one-shot interaction is equivalent to taking a risky bet, or if a trust decision entails an additional risk premium to balance the costs of trust betrayal. We compare a binary-choice Trust game with a structurally...