Description

Can the Public be Trusted? The Promise and Perils of Voluntary Compliance (Cambridge University Press, Open Access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/can-the-public-be-trusted/B3E11831E3051D4E928B9252B6767A4B) addresses a central puzzle in regulatory governance: if voluntary compliance offers compelling benefits—lower enforcement costs, better quality outcomes, cooperative relationships—why do regulatory agencies worldwide continue to default to deterrence-based approaches?

The book is structured to move from conceptual foundations to implementation challenges across regulatory domains. Early chapters establish what voluntary compliance means in regulatory contexts and explore the theoretical case for trust-based approaches. The analysis then examines empirical evidence through case studies in tax, environmental behavior, and public health, showing how voluntary compliance strategies leverage intrinsic motivation rather than sanctions and can produce higher quality outcomes when people embrace the spirit rather than just the letter of regulations.

Subsequent chapters identify formidable barriers to implementation: conceptual vagueness around terms like “intrinsic motivation” and “crowding out”; enormous institutional inertia in agencies structured around enforcement paradigms; democratic concerns about potentially manipulative interventions; and the fundamental limitation that trust-based approaches cannot guarantee universal compliance. The book devotes considerable attention to the perils of voluntary compliance, including risks of manipulation, potentially undemocratic bypassing of transparent rule-making, and often disappointing effect sizes.

Later chapters examine cross-cultural variation, showing how strategies effective in high-trust Nordic societies may fail in polarized contexts, and explore how digital technologies are transforming regulatory possibilities.

Rather than advocating voluntary compliance as a universal solution, the book’s central contribution is rejecting false binaries between coercion and voluntarism, providing a framework for determining when and how to deploy trust-based strategies effectively through sophisticated hybrid approaches.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Yuval Feldman is the Mori Lazarof Professor of Legal Research at Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, where he is the head of the ERC-funded Voluntary Compliance Lab. He is also a professor (by courtesy) in the Psychology Department of Bar-Ilan. Between 2021-2025 He has been the Associate Dean for Research.

His areas of research include Behavioral Analysis of Law, Experimental Law and Economics, Behavioral Ethics, Computational Law, Regulation, Enforcement, and Compliance. From 2011 to 2013, he was a fellow in the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics – Institutional Corruption Lab at Harvard Law School and the Implicit Social Cognition Lab in Harvard Psychology. He has advised various governmental bodies on behavioral and experimental informed policies in areas related to ethical decision making, trust-enhancing regulatory design, public cooperation, and enforcement in areas related to public health (Covid), environment, and tax. Between 2016-2020, he served as a member of Israel’s Young Academy of Sciences.

Feldman has received numerous national fellowships, including Rothschild, Fulbright, Alon, and awards such as Zeltner (2008, Young), Chesin (2019, Senior Researcher), Bruno Award (2020), Fatal Award (2021), and Provost’s Innovative Researcher (2023), as well as more than 30 competitive research grants from foundations such as Olin, GIF, Marie Curie, ISF (4 times), and IIAS. During the years 2022-2027, he hold the ERC Advanced Grant for his research on: Generating Voluntary Compliance Across Doctrines and Nations: Integrating Behavioural & Regulatory Aspects of Governments’ Ability to Trust the Public’s Cooperation, Ethicality & Compliance.

He has co-authored more than 80 papers, many of them published in leading journals in law, public policy, management, and psychology, among them NYU, Texas, Georgetown, and Northwestern Law Reviews, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Regulation & Governance, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Business Ethics, Psychological Science, Nature Human Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Behavioral Public Policy, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. He is on the editorial board of Regulation and Governance, Law & Policy, and European Journal of Law & Economics and among the founders of ComplianceNet, an interdisciplinary and global network of compliance researchers. His first book, “The Law of Good People,” was published by Cambridge University Press in June 2018. His second book, “Can the Public be Trusted,” was published in Nov 2025, also from Cambridge University Press.