sanctions

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Jan 13 10:08:51 PST 2000


[for all you Posner fans out there]

"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

Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=170713

Other Electronic Document Delivery:

http://www.bus.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/@Articles/Unpubli

shed/norms.pdf

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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



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