Dynamics and Stability of Informal Norms
by James A. Kitts
ABSTRACT
A recent study examined the interplay of formal and informal
control, showing how selective incentives to contribute to
collective goods may paradoxically lead to enforcement of
antisocial norms that oppose the collective good. A set of
simulation experiments identified conditions in which the
widely-cited effects of group cohesiveness, selective incentives,
and second-order free riding on collective action may be inverted.
This paper discusses some generic constraints on inferences from
computer simulation and investigates the same model
mathematically. This complementary view provides further insights
into the model’s behavior, relaxes some of the restrictive
assumptions of the computational experiment, and provides some
certain bounds on the model’s behavior.
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