Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation : Theory, experiments, and field studies

Abstract

The issue of cooperation has been a core topic in the social sciences for a long time, and for good reasons. Many societal matters share that everyone involved knows what they would prefer to see happening, but the incentives are such that this is hard or even impossible to achieve. Examples are abundant, and play at different levels of granularity. At the societal level, one could think of (trying to prevent) the depletion of collective resources or transitioning to a more sustainable society. At the level of organizations, one could think of trying to overcome the impulse to ben- efit in a business relation at the expense of the other party, or of the tendency for businesses to use legal constructs to evade taxes. Regardless of the grandiosity of these cooperation problems, similar arguments play a role in the provision of col- lective goods in neighborhoods or households, and even within a single person there can be friction between the current and the future self.