"Creating and Enforcing Norms, With Special Reference to
Sanctions"
BY: RICHARD A. POSNER
University of Chicago Law School
ERIC BENNETT RASMUSEN
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
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Paper ID: Indiana University Business Economics and Public
Policy Working Paper No. 99.003
Date: July 1999
Contact: ERIC BENNETT RASMUSEN
Email: Mailto:Erasmuse at Indiana.edu (best), Erasmuse at Juno.com.
Postal: Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
1309 East Tenth Street
Bloomington, IN 47405 USA
Phone: (812)855-9219
Fax: (812)855-3356
Co-Auth: RICHARD A. POSNER
Email: Mailto:paul_choi at law.uchicago.edu
Postal: University of Chicago Law School
LBQ 611
1111 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 USA
ABSTRACT:
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 in creating and
modifying norms. We use our analysis of the creation,
modification, and enforcement of norms to analyze the scope of
feasible government action either to promote desirable norms or
to repress undesirable ones. We conclude that the difficulty of
predicting the effect of such action limits its feasible scope.
JEL Classification: K00, P00, P50, Z10