2025 Starling Bookshelf

We speak a fair bit on the topics herein, at events where the organizers and audience are interested in learning how behavioral science, organizational network analytics, and machine-learning techniques are coming together in the context of culture and conduct risk governance and supervision. Nearly always someone asks, ”What can I read to learn more about this stuff?” 

So we’ve complemented our Compendium with reference to some of the works that sit dog-eared on our bookshelves, yellow highlighter marks competing with coffee stains and notes in the margins. We hope our readers will be inspired to give one or two of these terrific books a glance — and most particularly those by contributors to this or one of our past year’s reports, noted in bold below.

For more, please see our 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 Bookshelves.

The Political Economy of Trust

Institutions, Interests, and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany
Henry Farrell

“While formal institutions may very clearly support cooperation on a very wide scale, they do so primarily through promoting confidence rather than trust… In contrast, informal institutions may have more direct consequences for trust and cooperation… They will provide practical guidance to actors about how to behave in situations that were not fully anticipated in the relevant institutional rules.”

Our thanks go to Henry Farrell for contributing to the 2024 Compendium. Read his piece here.

The Political Economy of Trust