Instilling Norms in a Turmoil of Spillovers

Social norms and conventions have formally been defined as pertaining to static sets of situations. In this paper, we introduce a slight variation of Cristina Bicchieri's definition, where the set of situations is dynamically determined by previous actions. To suggest how the definition may be employed we first introduce a problem that would be hard to formulate within the classical definition: How to fight a destructive norm in a setting with a multitude of institutions. The example assumes that enforcement of conformative behavior in all institutions would be too costly. Further, enforcement of conformative behavior in a single institution would be drowned by defective behavioral spillovers from surrounding situations where the bad behavior is still the norm. The scheme drafted is to take the cost to enforce conformist behavior in a single institution while suspending the rest. The conformist behavior will after a while become the "the right thing to do" behavior in the kept institution.