Management Summary Research Study „Trust, Overinclusive Rules, and Selective Compliance”
This study examines how social trust shapes the interaction between overinclusive formal rules, social norms, and legal enforcement. The author first develops a static model in which individuals face a rule prohibiting an action that is sometimes harmful but often harmless (such as crossing on a red pedestrian signal at an empty intersection). Individuals differ in prosociality, the share of civic types is interpreted as social trust, and a rule-following norm imposes a violation cost that declines with trust. Higher trust weakens this norm and induces civic types to violate the rule in harmless situations while continuing to obey when violations would be harmful, whereas opportunistic types violate in all states. The author then introduces a government that chooses enforcement intensity. In equilibrium, low-trust societies select a rigid regime with strict enforcement and full compliance, while high-trust societies select a flexible regime with low enforcement in which officials exercise discretion and selectively punish mainly harmful violations, generating a stable pattern of tolerated noncompliance in harmless cases. A dynamic extension with overlapping generations and cultural transmission produces multiple steady states that differ in trust, norms, enforcement, and welfare. The practical implication is that high formal compliance is not automatically a sign of strong institutions, and that legal and cultural interventions must be evaluated jointly.
Target groups of stakeholders: Lawmakers and regulatory policymakers, law and economics scholars, political philosophers and political scientists working on social capital, journalists covering law enforcement, trust, and the quality of institutions.
Citation: Berggren, N. (2026). Trust, overinclusive rules, and selective compliance. Review of Law and Economics. Advance online publication.