Enumerating Rights: More is Not Always Better

Sheryl Ball, Chetan Dave and Stefan Dodds

No 2019-11, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics

Abstract: Policy debates increasingly employ the language of ‘rights’: how they are assigned and what entitlements individuals in a society are due. In designing present day constitutions for transitional democracies, framers face the issue of whether to formally codify rights or not. We design and implement a novel experiment to test whether social cooperation depends on the assignment of individual rights, by framing the right of subjects to take a particular action either positively or negatively. We find that when rights are framed positively, there exists an ‘entitlement effect’ that reduces social cooperation levels and crowds-out the tendency of individuals to act pro-socially.

Keywords: Constitutional Design; Coase Theorem; Framing; Preferences; Rights; Battle of the Sexes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2019-07-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~econwps/2019/wp2019-11.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Enumerating rights: more is not always better (2023)
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:ris:albaec:2019_011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joseph Marchand ().