This paper examines the determinants of informal sanctions by a large number of experiments.

This paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disapprovalaects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of thecommunity feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-)schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take...

Norms play an important role in establishing social order. Thecurrent literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impactof norms with regard to coordination and cooperation. However, theissue of norm-related conict deserves more attention. We develop ageneral theory of \normative...

Recent research has cast some doubt on the general validity of outcome-basedmodels of social preferences. We develop a model based on cognitive dissonance thatfocuses on the importance of self-image. An experiment (a dictator game variant)tests the model.First, we nd that subjects whose choices...

Why is it that well-intentioned actions can create persistent conflicts? While norms are widely regarded as a source for cooperation,this article proposes a novel theory in which the emergence of normscan be understood as a bargaining process in which normative conflicts explain the nally...

This paper studies the interplay between economic incentives and social norms in firms. Weintroduce a general framework to model social norms arguing that norms stem from agents’desire for, or peer pressure towards, social efficiency. In a simple model of team productionwe examine the...

Hayek’s approach to cultural and institutional evolution has been frequently criticizedbecause it is explicitly based on the controversial notion of (cultural) group selection. In this paperthis criticism is rejected on the basis of recent works on biological and cultural evolution....

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences.While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologistsrather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suer from distinctweaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in themeasurement of...

In line with the widely applied principle of just deserts, we assume that the severityof the penalty on a contract offender increases in the harm on the other. Whenthis principle holds, the influence of the efficiency of the agreement on the incentivesto abide by it crucially depends on whether...