EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules

Claude Fluet, Romain Espinosa and Bruno Deffains

Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques

Abstract: We conduct an experiment where participants choose between actions that provide private benefits but may also impose losses on strangers. Three legal environments are compared: no law, strict liability for the harm caused to others, and an efficiently designed negligence rule where damages are paid only when the harmful action causes a net social loss. Legal obligations are either perfectly enforced (Severe Law) or only weakly so (Mild Law), i.e., material incentives are then nondeterrent. We investigate how legal obligations and social norms interact. Our results show that liability rules strengthen pro-social behavior and suggest that strict liability has a greater effect than the negligence rule.

Keywords: Behavioral law and economics; liability rules; Social norms; social preferences; legal norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 K13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.crrep.ca/sites/crrep.ca/files/fichier_p ... /crrep-2017-05_0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Laws and norms: Experimental evidence with liability rules (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules (2017) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:crrecr:1705

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from Centre de recherche sur les risques, les enjeux économiques, et les politiques publiques Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis (manuel.paradis.1@ulaval.ca).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:lvl:crrecr:1705