Abstract
In 1992 a large portion of the public elder care in Sweden was transferred from the counties to the municipalities, the so called Ädel Reform. Although there was a wide-spread consensus among politicians about the necessity of the reform, the process took some 30 years. Traditional economic theories might be less suitable for explaining both the slow process and the outcome of the reform. In this paper insights from economic psychology are used as an improvement on more traditional economic theories. This paper covers the political process that preceded the reform, an evaluation of the economic consequences of the reform and an attempt to explain some of the particularities of the reform using economic psychological theories.