Chris Bidner

Cultivating Trust: Norms, Institutions and the Implications of Scale

We study the co-evolution of norms and institutions in order to better understand the conditions under which potential gains from new trading opportunities are realized. New trading opportunities are particularly vulnerable to opportunistic behavior and therefore tend to provide fertile ground for cheating. Cheating discourages production, raising equilibrium prices and therefore the return to cheating, thereby encouraging further cheating. However, such conditions also provide institutional designers with relatively high incentives to improve institutions. We show how an escape from the shadow of opportunism requires that institutional improvements out-pace the deterioration of norms. A key prediction from the model emerges: larger economies are more likely to evolve to steady states with strong honesty norms. This prediction is tested using a cross section of countries; population size is found to have a significant positive relationship with a measure of trust, even when controlling for standard determinants of trust and institutional quality.

A Spillover-Based Theory of Credentialism

I propose a model in which credentials, such as diplomas, are intrinsically valuable; a situation described as credentialism. The model overcomes an important criticism of signalling models by mechanically tying a worker’s wages to their productivity. A worker’s productivity is influenced by the skills of their coworkers, where such skills arise from an ability-augmenting investment that is made prior to matching with coworkers. A worker’s credentials allow them to demonstrate their investment to the labor market, thereby allowing workers to match with high-skill coworkers in equilibrium. Despite the positive externality associated with a worker’s investment, I show how over-investment is pervasive in equilibrium.

Pre-match investment with frictions☆

The paper explores an environment in which agents are motivated to make unproductive investments with the sole aim of improving their matching opportunities. In contrast to existing work, I add frictions by allowing the investment to be imperfectly observed. The analysis allows for a deeper understanding of the trade-off inherent in related models: investments waste resources but facilitates more efficient matching patterns. I show that greater frictions i) do not always lead to inferior matching patterns, and ii) can force the economy into to a Pareto preferred equilibrium.

Trust and Vulnerability

By facilitating mutually beneficial transactions, trust is a crucial ingredient for economic development. We explore the determinants of trust by studying a model in which agents rely on imperfectly enforceable contracts to support cooperation in a prisoners’ dilemma production game. We show how a fundamental relationship between vulnerability and trust emerges when players observe private signals of the strength of contract enforceability, even in the limit as signal noise vanishes. In uncovering this relationship, the model demonstrates the importance of social institutions in the development process. We show stronger social institutions, by reducing vulnerability, increase equilibrium trust, promote the use of superior technologies, and interact with formal legal institutions.