Expressive Law: Framing or Equilibrium Selection?

Iris Bohnet and Robert Cooter
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Robert Cooter: U of California, Berkeley

Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: Besides deterring people, laws may affect behavior by changing preferences or beliefs. A law may elicit intrinsic motivation by framing an act as wrong. Alternatively, it may coordinate the behavior of different people by changing their beliefs about what others will do. We investigate framing and coordination effects experimentally in prisoner's dilemma, "crowding" and coordination games. We simulate a law by imposing a probabilistic penalty on one of the choices. In the prisoner's dilemma and the crowding game, announcing the penalty had no effect. In the coordination game, announcing the penalty caused behavior to jump to the Pareto-superior equilibrium. Keywords: Equilibrium selection, framing, expressive law, experiments, coordination, prisoner's dilemma

JEL-codes: C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-11
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Working Paper: Expressive Law: Framing or Equilibrium Selection? (2001)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp03-046

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