Institutions are an important means for fostering prosocial behaviors, but in many contexts their scope is limited and they govern only a subset of all socially desirable acts. We use a laboratory experiment to study how the presence and nature of an institution that enforces prosocial behavior...

This paper reports an experiment examining the effect of social norms on pro-social behavior. We test two predictions derived from work in psychology regarding the influence of norms. The first is a 'focusing' influence, whereby norms only impact behavior when an individual's attention is drawn...

We explore the influence of social norms on behavior. To do so, we introduce a method for identifying norms, based on the property that social norms reflect social consensus regarding the appropriateness of different possible behaviors. We demonstrate that the norms we elicit, along with a...