2.1. Conceptualizing National Culture and its Interaction with Finance Cultural factors can and do have a significant impact on financial decision making. Financial decisions are driven by information costs and asymmetry, agency costs, moral hazard and incomplete contracts. In order to mitigate some of the effects of these imperfections, economists and researchers argue that agents develop contracts that better align the interests of the various economic agents involved within the legal framework in a given jurisdiction. This approach underlies the burgeoning law and economics literature however all such contracts are necessarily incomplete as specifying all contingencies is impossible in practice. Contracting parties are thus forced to depend on the interaction of relative ethics, social mores, and customary business practices all these are collectively t of what we commonly term culture. Thus, from first principles we can see that cultural and other soft measurements of the nature of social and business interactions are important determinants of economic and financial decisions.