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.