Institutional Violations, Costs and Attitudes

Abstract

The paper proposes an alternative approach to the ontology of social institutions by systematizing various normative institutional influences and identifying processes that distinguish between conforming and violating behaviour. The prevailing -cost-based model -suggests that an agent's conformity to a specific institutional rule can be represented by a single measure -cost. The model is limited in its explanatory potential since it accounts for varieties of institutional behaviour in terms of single parametrical changes in the agents' utilities. The central argument shows that normative attitudes represent a distinctive normative structure capable of explaining crucial aspects of institutional behaviour. These attitudinal aspects provide the structure necessary for understanding institutional normativity and its violations.

Social Norms and Agent Types: Bridging the Gap Between the Theoretical Models and Their Applications

“…The foundational model of social norms typically describes a two-person interaction of agents with a specific motivational structure, most commonly in the form of the Prisoner’s dilemma game (Ulmann-Margalit 1977; Sugden 1986; Schotter 1981; Fehr and Schurtenberger 2018, cf. Zachník 2022b). The two individuals have certain beliefs concerning their colleague’s actions, and they also have expectations about the social evaluation of their actions by the group members, i.e., normative expectations (Sugden 1998; Bicchieri 2006; Bicchieri and Xiao 2009).…”

“…They have a few links amongst themselves that keep track of some pathways of influence: norm subjects are the agents who are directly under the normative influence, and they ought to follow the behavioral requirements stated by the explicit rule or standards existing implicitly in their community. Therefore, what they do is not entirely determined by their intrinsic motivation, as they are also attentive to what the audience thinks about the demanded behavior and whether enforcers might sanction or reward some actions (Zachník 2022b).

Figure 2.Triangular schema of norm-agents.

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“…The components are not usually spelt out in terms of agent types or their roles (as proposed here) but instead contained in the definition of a social norm as a behavioral regularity described exclusively from the norm subjects’ perspective. The general idea of the subject-centric view is straightforward: individuals are motivated to conform to the norms through several mechanisms, such as normative reasons, social influence, and sanctions, where all these factors are described in terms of modifying the subject’s behavior (through conditional preferences or normative expectations, Zachník 2022b). In contrast, it seems helpful to complement these abstract models of social norms with the recent empirical findings that explore more detailed settings in real-world circumstances.…”

Untitled

“…It is worth emphasizing that in 1975 the American Marketing Association (AMA) published one of the first definitions of green marketing -"environmental marketing is a type of activity that consists in the distribution of products considered safe for the environment on the market" (Zachnik, 2022).…”