Disenchanting Trust: Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Governance, and China’s Emerging Social Credit System

Social Trust and Economic Governance

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 societ...

Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason

R. Jay Wallace There are two tendencies in our thinking about instrumental rationality that do not seem to cohere very well. On the one hand, the instrumental principle—enjoining us to take the means that are necessary relative to our ends—does not seem to apply indifferently to any end that we might be motivated to pursue. There is, for instance, no genuine requirement to take the means that a...

The Scope of Instrumental Reason

An Emerging Credit Reporting System in China

This paper examines the development of a credit reporting system in China. We first outline the rationale for having a credit reporting system through reviewing the literature on asymmetric information. We then proceed to discuss how the credit reporting system works in China. First we present a case study of a private credit reporting agency in Chengdu that was established in 2000. This was th...

Office of Research Social Trust and Economic Governance

The paper investigates the dynamic relationship between social trust and economic governance and provides a possible explanation for their long-term trends and crosssectional variation. To mitigate the inherent moral hazard problem in a principal— agent situation, both intrinsic trustworthiness and extrinsic incentives are useful. The distribution of intrinsic trustworthiness among agents chara...