Game-Theoretic Accounts of Social Norms: The Role of Normative Expectations (original) (raw)
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Norms among heterogeneous agents: a rational-choice model
ILE Working Paper Series, No. 78, 2024
Spontaneous norms, or simply norms, can be defined as rules of conduct that emerge without intentional design and in the absence of purposeful external coordination. While the law and economics scholarship has formally analyzed spontaneous norms, the analysis has typically been limited to scenarios where agents possess complete information about the interaction structure, including others' understanding of desirable and undesirable outcomes. In contrast, this paper examines spontaneous norms under the assumption of agent heterogeneity and private preferences. By employing a game-theoretical framework, the analysis reveals that norms' lifecycle can be divided into a formative phase and a long-run phase. The formative phase crucially shapes the norm's content and is itself critically dependent on the initial beliefs that agents hold about each other. Moreover, spontaneous norms are resilient to minor shocks to the belief structure but disintegrate when the magnitude of shocks becomes significant. In the final part, the paper highlights the broader implications of its findings, indicating applications in general law and economics, legal anthropology and history, and the sociology of social norms.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
We explore a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior in which people care not about others' payoffs per se, but whether their own behavior accords with social norms. Individuals who are sensitive to norms will adhere to them so long as they observe others doing the same. A model formalizing this generates heterogeneous prosociality without relying on explicit distributional preferences and provides clear testable predictions if norm-sensitivity is observable. We design a simple experiment that allows us to measure individual-level norm-sensitivity and we show that norm-sensitivity explains heterogeneity in prosociality in public goods, dictator, ultimatum, and trust games.
Social norms and game theory: harmony or discord?
Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than they seem. We then argue that those three theories struggle to account for three phenomena pertaining to social norms (namely context-dependence, conflicting norms and self-evidence), with which any complete game-theoretic account should in principle be able to deal.
Groups and Social Norms in the Economic Context: A Preliminary Experimental Investigation
CEEL Working Papers, 2004
Economics has not widely investigated the role of group identity in defining social norms. The present experiment considers the interplay between choices having social dimension and a notion of group affiliation based on shared intrinsic characteristics. More specifically, a triadic game setting (Cox, 2004) will be presented to detect trust, reciprocity and other-regarding concerns in choices relevant either for IN-group subjects or OUT-group subjects. What emerges from the experiment is that in general subjects do not conform to a rational ...
Social Norms and Economic Theory
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1989
One of the most persistent cleavages in the social sciences is the opposition between two lines of thought conveniently associated with Adam Smith and Emile Durkheim, between homo economicus and homo sociologicus. Of these, the former is supposed to be guided by instrumental rationality, while the behavior of the latter is dictated by social norms. In this paper I characterize this contrast more fully, and discuss attempts by economists to reduce normoriented action to some type of optimizing behavior. Social norms, as I understand them here, are emotional and behavioral propensities of individuals. Are norms rationalizations of self-interest? Are norms followed out of self-interest? Do norms exist to promote self-interest? Do norms exist to promote common interests? Do norms exist to promote genetic fitness?
An exploration of the content of social norms using simple games
Working Papers in Economic Theory, 2010
The literature on social norms stresses that compliance with norms is approved while deviance is disapproved. Based on this, we explore the content of social norms using experimental data from five dictator games with a feedback stage. Our data suggests that subjects either care about a reciprocity or an efficiency norm.
Groups and Social Norms: A Preliminary Experimental Investigation
2005
Abstract Economics has not widely investigated the role of group identity in defining social norms. The present experiment considers the interplay between choices having social dimension and a notion of group affiliation based on shared intrinsic characteristics. More specifically, a triadic game setting (Cox, 2004) will be presented to detect trust, reciprocity and other-regarding concerns in choices relevant either for IN-group subjects or OUT-group subjects.
INCENTIVES AND SOCIAL NORMS: A MOTIVATION-BASED ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NORMS
It is now commonplace to regard social norms as a subject of growing interest in the economic literature (e.g. game theoretical approaches based on 'other-regarding' individual preferences, the analysis of the impact of rewards or punishment on individuals' behaviour through experimental economics as well as field experiments, the revival of the institutionalist tradition spurred on by the influential work of Douglas North and followed by many others and the growing influence of neuroeconomics). In this paper, we focus on the relationship between incentives and social norms and survey the literature that could constitute the foundations of a motivation-based economic analysis of social norms. Our main findings are that (1) the interaction between incentives and social norms is far from obvious since taking social norms into account involves the introduction of supplementary motives, in addition to self-interest, into the economic analytical framework; (2) the analysis of the interaction between incentives and social norms resists an approach exclusively in terms of crowding-in and-out effects because it is sensitive to whether it concerns behaviours driven by honour or by social stigma; (3) as a result, it is difficult to precisely evaluate the policy implication of the interactions between incentives and social norms.
Norms, Preferences, and Conditional Behavior
Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 9(3), 2010
This article addresses several issues raised by Nichols, Gintis, and Skyrms and Zollman in their comments on my book, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. In particular, I explore the relation between social and personal norms, what an adequate game-theoretic representation of norms should be, and what models of norms emergence should tell us about the formation of normative expectations.