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Social Trust And Economic Governance, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The paper investigates the dynamic relationship between social trust and economic governance using a principal-agent model with stochastic returns. To mitigate the inherent moral hazard problem both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives are useful. The cooperative tendency of an agent measures his intrinsic discipline against shirking, the distribution of which characterizes social trust in society. The economic governance methods include direct monitoring and efficiency wage. The main results are the following. An agent with a higher cooperative tendency needs less monitoring and a lower wage to make effort, which brings higher profit for the principal. But competition among principals for more …