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Norms, Rationality, And Communication: A Reputation Theory Of Social Norms, Andreas Engert

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Does the discovery of "law and social norms" necessitate breaking with the rational choice paradigm? In this paper, I argue for an answer in the negative. To this end, I propose a reputation theory of social norms, which differs from other proposals in two principal respects: First, it explains norms without any assumption of behavioral constraints (like habit or conscience) and normative motivations (like altruism or aspiration to esteem). Second, it does even without any assumption regarding model-exogenous, private information that most other reputation and signaling explanations use (such as the discount rate in Eric Posner's signaling model).

Instead, reputation …