ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to assess trustworthiness and control as governance devices in order to identify or develop a heuristic that enables better decision making regarding the economics of governance. In the context of signaling/screening, it is important to be aware that trustees are tempted to “manage” impressions of trustworthiness or may even engage in deception, such as example, “social engineering”. Compared to the Encapsulated Interest account, the Leap of Faith account finds the “perceived trustworthiness paradigm” restrictive and argues that trust goes beyond the because of the “will” of the trustor. Compared to the Encapsulated Interest account, New Institutional Economics as a field of research in economics works on the assumption that players are opportunistic, that is, not trustworthy regarding their intrinsic motivations. In the strand of New Institutional Economics, there can be found attachment points for trustworthiness by understanding non-opportunism as intrinsic institution, but it was hardly used as such to date.
