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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics
Laws And Norms With (Un)Observable Actions, Claude Fluet, Murat C. Mungan
Laws And Norms With (Un)Observable Actions, Claude Fluet, Murat C. Mungan
Faculty Scholarship
We analyze the interactions between social norms, the prevalence of acts, and policies when people cannot directly observe actors’ behavior and must rely on noisy proxies. Norms provide ineffective incentives when acts are committed either very frequently or very infrequently, because noisy signals of behavior are then too weak to alter people’s beliefs about others’ behavior. This cuts against the dynamics of the ‘honor-stigma’ model (Bénabou and Tirole 2006; 2011), and leads to the opposite positive and normative conclusions with even modest errors. The review process through which public signals are provided is then an additional policy variable. When the …
The Visible Hand: Coordination Functions Of The Regulatory State, Robert B. Ahdieh
The Visible Hand: Coordination Functions Of The Regulatory State, Robert B. Ahdieh
Faculty Scholarship
We live in a coordination economy. As one surveys the myriad challenges of modern social and economic life, an ever increasing proportion is defined not by the need to reconcile competing interests, but by the challenge of getting everyone on the same page. Conflict is not absent in these settings. It is not, however, the determinative factor in shaping our behaviors and resulting interactions. That essential ingredient, instead, is coordination.
Such coordination is commonly understood as the function of the market. As it turns out, however, optimal coordination will not always emerge, as if led “by an invisible hand.” Even …