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The coordinating power of social norms

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Abstract

A popular empirical technique to measure norms uses coordination games to elicit what subjects in an experiment consider appropriate behavior in a given situation (Krupka and Weber in J Eur Econ Assoc 11(3):495–524, 2013). The Krupka–Weber method works under the assumption that subjects use their normative expectations to solve the coordination game. However, subjects might use alternative focal points to coordinate, in which case the method may deliver distorted measurements of the social norm. We test the vulnerability of the Krupka–Weber method to the presence of alternative salient focal points in two series of experiments with more than 3000 subjects. We find that the method is robust, especially when there are clear normative expectations about what constitutes appropriate behavior.

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Notes

  1. See Bicchieri (2006) for a discussion of the differences between social norms, moral norms and personal norms.

  2. All experiments were programmed using the software LIONESS (Giamattei et al., 2020).

  3. In the instructions we explicitly told subjects that the other participants they were trying to coordinate with were other AMT workers from the US who were completing the same task, using the same decision screen as the subject. See Appendix A in the Online Supplemental Materials (OSM) for the instructions used in the study.

  4. We find no difference between T4 and T5 (p = 0.489), or between T1 and T2 (p = 0.253). We find significant differences between T3 and both T1 and T2 (p = 0.011 in either case). Throughout the paper we report p-values corrected for multiple comparisons using the false discovery rate procedure described in Simes (1986) and Benjamini and Hochberg (1995). In the case of the two pilot experiments, we correct for the fact that there are 10 possible bilateral comparisons between the 5 treatments.

  5. In the analysis below we will adjust p-values for multiple hypothesis testing (44 tests in total). To take this into account in the power analysis, we performed a conservative version of our power calculations with α = (0.05/44) = 0.001 and find that the minimum detectable effect size for each comparison is 0.37.

  6. We focus on data from the baseline KW treatment, instead of the treatments with visual labels, because the visual labels affect the heterogeneity of ratings. Thus, the baseline KW treatment offers a cleaner benchmark for the degree of normative consensus about the different actions in the game.

  7. There is one exception: we introduced an attention check in the experimental software to improve the quality of responses. The check was positioned after the decision-making part of the experiment. We exclude from the analysis observations that do not pass the check (78 subjects). Results are unchanged if we do not exclude these subjects.

  8. As in Study 1, we will adjust p values for multiple hypothesis testing (55 tests in total). A more conservative power analysis that takes this into account shows that the minimum detectable effect size for each comparison is 0.26.

  9. In theory, the presence of alternative focal points may confound the elicitation of norms without resulting in dispersed ratings, for instance if the alternative focal point is sufficiently strong to sway a large majority of subjects to use it as a coordination device in the Krupka–Weber task. Empirically, we do not think that this is very plausible given that in our experiment we still observe dispersion in the Krupka–Weber ratings for the overgenerous actions even when we introduce very salient alternative focal points in the task.

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Acknowledgements

We received helpful comments from the Editor Lata Gangadharan, two anonymous referees, Abigail Barr, Zvonimir Bašić, Georgia Michailidou, Adriaan Soetevent and Bob Sugden. We acknowledge funding from the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and the Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF Starting Grant 36835).

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  1. Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Francesco Fallucchi

  2. Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Daniele Nosenzo

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  1. Francesco Fallucchi
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  2. Daniele Nosenzo
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Correspondence to Daniele Nosenzo.

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Fallucchi, F., Nosenzo, D. The coordinating power of social norms. Exp Econ 25, 1–25 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-021-09717-8

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