Social norms and social preferences have become an integral part of the economics discourse. Here we show that models of social preferences limit themselves to capturing stable dispositions toward an exogenously-defined principle of conduct (e.g., I am kind to another person, if that person is kind to me, according to the modeler’s definition of kindness). By contrast, social norms are better understood as group-specific solutions to strategic problems: more precisely, we define social norms as regularities resulting from conformist preferences, that are conditional on “empirical beliefs” and on endogenous “normative expectations” (i.e., second-order beliefs that a certain behavior ought to be followed). Building on Bicchieri’s earlier research, we argue that accounting for endogenous behavioral rules is key to the understanding of norms.

[Relatedly, the Social Norms article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives an all-around account of past and current research on norms, with a focus on the philosophical literature: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-norms/]

Opportunistic Conformism  (with G. Charness and M. Naef; Journal of Economic Theory, 2019). We examine a novel class of conformist preferences that is within the realm of psychological game theory. We propose that beliefs about the behavior of individuals in the same role (i.e., beliefs about “peer behavior”) directly affect a player’s utility. In examining conformism we propose an experimental design that verifies the presence of the relevant causality direction. Our data reveal “opportunistically conformist” behavior, as subjects are more likely to follow the purported majority if doing so implies an increase in expected material payoff. We provide a theoretical model that accounts for such a pattern.

I Cannot Cheat on You After We Talk  (with C. Bicchieri) in The Prisoner’s Dilemma, ed. Martin Peterson. Cambridge University Press, 2015. [This is part of a collection of research papers at the interface of game theory & philosophy. Among the contributors to this volume are K. Binmore, D. Gauthier, D. M. Hausman, G. Bonanno, C. Holt, etc.]

Experimental evidence on pre-play communication supports a “focusing function of communication” hypothesis. Relevant communication facilitates cooperative, pro-social behavior because it causes a shift in individuals’ focus towards strategies dictated by some salient social norm. After reviewing the formal foundations for a general theory of conformity to social norms, we provide an original application illustrating how a framework that allows for different conjectures about norms is able to capture the focusing function of communication and to explain experimental results.

Strategic Problems with Risky Prospects: Modeling and Testing the Impact of Feedback in Complex Interactions  (with C. Bicchieri, A. Funcke, and E. Hart; R&R Games and Economic Behavior). We study decision-making in interactions where the presence of multiple unknowns makes for complex hypothetical reasoning. Specifically, we propose a threshold game played by a large population of players, where strategic uncertainty is compounded by risky prospects (i.e., chance moves with commonly-known conditional probabilities). In the first half of the paper, we provide a Bayesian model of decision-making that accounts for players’ inherent risk preferences. In the second half of the paper, we test the model via an experiment that verifies if decision quality is affected by exposure to noisy feedback. The results confirm that the feedback brings about a belief revision in the expected direction. Yet, contrary to standard predictions, the data indicate that the feedback induces also a decrease in “behavioral errors”; that is, subjects who receive feedback are less likely to fail to respond optimally to their beliefs, regardless of whether their beliefs are correct or not.

A Dynamic Model of Belief-Dependent Conformity to Social Norms.  Human conduct is often guided by “conformist preferences”, which thrive on behavioral expectations within a society, with conformity being the act of changing one’s behavior to match the purported beliefs of others. Despite a growing research line considering preferences for a fair outcome allocation, economic theories do not explain the fundamental conditions for some social norm – whether of fairness or not – to be followed. Inspired by Bicchieri’s account of norms (C. Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society. Cambridge UP [2006]), I develop a behavioral theory of norm conformity building on the Battigalli-Dufwenberg “psychological” framework (P. Battigalli and M. Dufwenberg, Dynamic Psychological Games, J.Econ.Theory, 144:1-35 [2009]).