Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior

Zvonimir Bašic () and Eugenio Verrina
Additional contact information
Zvonimir Bašic: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn

No 2020_25, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study the relevance of personal norms across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms — together with social norms and monetary payoff — are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior. Moreover, they are: i) distinct from social norms across a series of economic contexts, ii) robust to an exogenous increase in the salience of social norms, and iii) complementary to social norms in predicting behavior. Our findings support personal norms as a key driver of economic behavior.

Keywords: Personal norms; social norms; social image; elicitation method; normative conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D63 D64 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10, Revised 2023-10-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hme, nep-soc and nep-upt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2020_25online.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior (2024)
Working Paper: Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior (2024)
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:mpg:wpaper:2020_25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marc Martin ().