This project asks why people comply with legal norms: because they rationally weigh the costs of getting caught, as standard economic models assume, or because they feel a genuine obligation to obey, as legal philosophers argue.
A laboratory experiment shows that legal norms curb people's search for self-serving information regardless of the norm's content, and that compliance is high whether the norm demands generosity or selfishness - supporting the view that legal norms function as obligations rather than as just another cost to weigh.
Economists typically model legal compliance as the result of weighing the material and non-material costs of violating a norm against its benefits. Legal philosophers, in contrast, argue that the normative force of law is what matters: people comply because they feel obligated to, and a legal norm gives them an 'exclusionary reason' that pre-empts further cost-benefit weighing.
We test these two views in a modified dictator game, in which a legal norm can prescribe either a selfish or a generous distribution of resources, and participants can pay a small cost to search for information that could excuse deviating from the norm.
The experiment finds that the presence of a legal norm reduces information search regardless of its content, and that compliance is high whether the norm is selfish or self-sacrificial. These patterns are consistent with a model of norms as obligations, rather than with a model in which legal norms merely shift the cost-benefit calculus of compliance.
Publication in peer-reviewed journal
Replication package
