Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, organized a conference on April 2, 2009, at the Barbara Jordan Conference Center at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, D.C., to discuss the future of social policies affecting women in the wake of a new national administration. Four main topics were covered, with three panelists to discuss each topic. The first topic considered women in the economic recovery, including how to strengthen the economy by rebuilding the nation’s physical and human infrastructure.
An ethnographic study of the development of trusting relations between traders and producers in the vanilla market of Madagascar.
Case studies of four union leaders to explore the role that democratic rules and procedures play in affecting trust, trustworthiness, and good representation in relationships between union leaders and their constituents.
The decision to extend credit to a borrower is fundamentally about trust. In credit markets, firms like Dun and Bradstreet help lenders determine who is trustworthy and who is not by examining the past behavior of potential borrowers. By instilling bankers with a sense of trust in borrowers whom they did not know personally, credit raters conceivably expand access to lending. But how true is the old adage that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior? Are credit ratings accurate predictors of loan default?
Principal-agency theory assumes that incentives are necessary to motivate the agent (employee) to act in the best interests of the principal (employer). Yet preliminary studies by Andrew Whitford of the University of Kansas revealed a different outcome: principals paid agents for effort without being able to monitor their performance, and the agents supplied. Whitford and his colleagues William Bottom and Gary Miller of Washington University hypothesize that principal-agency theory will not hold true when trust enters the equation.
Economic theory views the rates of technological development and diffusion as the prime engines of growth. But creating new technologies is not enough: they must be accepted by users in the economy. Adopting a new technology often requires trust that a new product is an actual improvement over what was available in the past. High-trust economies may enjoy a competitive advantage if new products diffuse more quickly and at lower cost.
The markets for true commodities are different from those for other goods. While buyers in other markets are concerned with many facets of quality, commodity purchasers care only that the final product for these goods meets a single standard. Does this affect the extent to which participants in these markets must rely on trust when transacting?
Markets and social networks are sometimes portrayed as entirely distinct mechanisms for exchanging goods and services, but a rich social network is a valuable asset that can be used within markets to gain access to scarce resources from individuals who prefer to trade with those they know and trust.
Cooperation often benefits all parties involved in an agreement or relationship, but such behavior is often difficult to bring about because of a lack of trust. Some theorists have suggested that obstacles to trusting can be thwarted with effective use of communication and contracts. With support from the Russell Sage Foundation, Avner Ben-Ner of the University of Minnesota and Louis Putterman of Brown University will test the effectiveness of these proposed remedies with laboratory experiments.
Previous research has focused on the reasons that people discriminate in relationships where two parties are forced to interact. However, discrimination can also occur through selection; that is, people may choose to interact with one individual over another because of gender or ethnic stereotypes. This type of exclusion can have powerful consequences, as minorities might be consistently excluded from attractive jobs, desirable neighborhoods, and other opportunities, simply because those in the majority prefer to select their own kind.