IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v59y1992i1p63-80..html

Social Norms and Community Enforcement

Author

Listed:
  • Michihiro Kandori

Abstract

The present paper extends the theory of self-enforcing agreements in a long-term relationship (the Folk Theorem in repeated games) to the situation where agents change their partners over time. Cooperation is sustained because defection against one agent causes sanction by others, and the paper shows how such a "social norm" is sustained by self-interested agents under various degrees of observability. Two main results are presented. The first one is an example where a community can sustain cooperation even when each agent knows nothing more than his personal experience. The second shows a Folk Theorem that the community can realize any mutually beneficial outcomes when each agent carries a label such as reputation, membership, or licence, which are revised in a systematic way.

Suggested Citation

  • Michihiro Kandori, 1992. "Social Norms and Community Enforcement," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 59(1), pages 63-80.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:59:y:1992:i:1:p:63-80.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2297925
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:59:y:1992:i:1:p:63-80.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.