Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The Adam Smith rule, named after Adam Smith, is a simplification of political behavior derived from a study of Oakland, California which was conducted by Frank Levy, Arnold Meltsner, and Aaron Wildavsky and briefly mentioned in Managing Urban America. This rule states, "When a customer makes a request, take care of him in a professional manner; otherwise, leave him alone." An applied example of this would be a city which professionally maintains certain streets, and ignores maintenance on others. See also: political science This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.