Two central puzzles about social norms are how they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for the violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral-costly, and multilateral-costly. The choice of sanction is related to problems...

All judges in Japan, except those on the Supreme Court, become judges at a relatively young age by process of rigorous examination and then spend their career rotating through various positions. Although the judicial system handles its own promotion procedure, this raises the possibility that...

We are grateful to Ilya Segal and Michael Whinston for improving our analysis. We are pleased they confirm our two main conclusions. The first is that normally a firm cannot use contracts with its customers or suppliers inefficiently to exclude a rival from competition, because the high price of...

Social contract theories assume that because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, citizens will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his citizens once they have lain down their arms? The social...