This paper provides an argument for the advantage of a preference for identity-consistent behaviour from an evolutionary point of view. Within a stylised model of social interaction, we show that the development of cooperative social norms is greatly facilitated if the agents of the society...

While social norms have received great attention within economics, little is known about the role of personal norms. We propose a simple utility framework - which assumes that people care about monetary payoff, social norms, and personal norms - and design a novel two-part experiment to...

People frequently behave non-selfishly in situations where they can reduce their own payoff to help others. It is typically assumed that such pro-social behavior arises because people are motivated by a social preference. An alternative explanation is that they follow a social norm. We test with...

We extend the literature structurally estimating social preferences by accounting for the desire to adhere to social norms. Our representative agent is strongly motivated by norms and failing to account for this causes us to overestimate how much agents care about helping those who are worse...

We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study the relevance of personal norms across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms — together with social norms and monetary payoff — are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior....

We study whether social norm perception in economic laboratory experiments differs between subjects that participate for the first time and subjects that already participated many times. Consistent with previous studies, inexperienced subjects pronounce egalitarianism, while experienced subjects...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...