Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This paper follows the law and norms literature in arguing that policymakers can use social norms to support or even replace regulation. Key to the approach offered here is the idea — borrowed from the folk theorem in game theory — that cooperative order can arise in circumstances where parties repeatedly interact. This paper proposes that repeated interaction between the same agents, specifically the intensity of it, may be used as a yardstick with which to gauge the potential to scale back regulation and use social norms as a substitute for law. Where there are very high levels of repeated …