The use of social sanctions against behaviour which contradicts a set of informal rules is often an important element in the functioning of informal institutions in traditional societies. In the social sciences, sanctioning behaviour has often been explained in terms of the internalisation of...

In small groups norm enforcement is provided by mutual punishment and reward. In large societies we have enforcement institutions. This paper shows how such institutions can emerge as a decentralized equilibrium. In a first stage, individuals invest in a public enforcement technology. This...

The enforcement of social norms is considered as a main motivation for third-party intervention. We provide direct evidence for this theory in a cross-country experimental trust game with a sender, a receiver, and a third party who can punish or reward the receiver at own cost. As a novelty we...

Very little is known about the efficient collection of fines despite their indispensable contribution to local government budgets. This paper fills an important gap in the literature by studying the effectiveness of deterrence (enforcement) and non-deterrence (social norms) letters that aim to...