Group conflicts often break out in which individuals have to choose who to support. Having more supporters tends to increase one's chances of success in conflict, so everyone would prefer to have more supporters. But support is scarce, and sometimes conflicts can arise between two people who...

Punishment is understood to be necessary to the creation and maintenance of social norms. We argue that it can be driven by resentment that arises when norms are violated. Using a model of endogenous norms, we show how to define a norm-violation on any game or choice set and how to predict which...

Social norms are based on expectations of what others believe and do, and so they can shift in response to what trendsetters -- highly visible media or political leaders -- say or do. There is evidence that former President Trump as a trendsetter has weakened norms against expressing...

It is common for auctions to feature reserve prices that are kept secret. In auctions with independent private values, there is no clear theoretical explanation for why the reserve price should be disclosed publicly or kept secret. Therefore, we conducted laboratory experiments to investigate...

Little is known about the personality and cognitive traits that shape adolescents’ sensitivity to social norms. Further, few studies have harnessed novel empirical tools to elicit sensitivity to social norms among adolescent populations. This paper examines the association between sensitivity...

Norm-based accounts of social behavior are increasingly common in economics. In such accounts, behavior is seen as reflecting tradeoffs between maximization of own consumption utility and conformity to social norms. Theories of norm-following tend to assume that a) there exists a single, stable,...

Bicchieri and Xiao (2009) proposed one of the first methods to elicit normative expectations. Using a two-step procedure, the method first elicits non-incentivized reports of subjects’ Personal Normative Beliefs (PNBs) about which action is normatively best. In the second step, subjects are...

We propose a framework for modeling the influence of normative considerations on decision-making and social interaction. Our key insight is that axiomatic models like those used in cooperative game theory can be reinterpreted as theories of moral reasoning and norm formation which describe the...