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Thursday, April 01, 2010

"Norms as a Substitute for Laws"

What's the the right balance between norms and laws? Rajiv Sethi argues that the optimal balance is difficult to determine, and that economists need to devote more attention to this question:

Norms as a Substitute for Laws, by Rajiv Sethi: In a fascinating post on joke-theft in the world of stand-up comedy, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman describe the manner in which social norms backed by informal sanctions can accomplish what copyright laws cannot:

...Comedians have rules of their own about joke-stealing. And they impose their own punishments on thieves... Why do comedians do this? In part, because they live in a world where intellectual property law – in particular, copyright – does not help them much when a rival comedian steals a joke... lawsuits are simply too expensive and uncertain to work as an effective response... Today’s comics are intent on enforcing ownership rights. Yet they do so via social norms – informal but nonetheless powerful rules enforced by comedians on their peers... Comedians maintain a small list of commandments that every comic must follow – or risk being ostracized, boycotted, and sometimes worse. These norms track copyright law at times... More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas...
Importantly, comedians’ norms... include informal but powerful punishments. These start with simple badmouthing and ostracism. If that doesn’t work, punishments may escalate to a refusal to work with the offending comedian – which can keep the accused joke-thief off of comedy club rosters. Occasionally, punishments turn violent. None of these sanctions depend on the law – indeed, when comedians resort to threatening or beating up joke thieves, that’s against the law. That said, although both the rules and the punishments are informal, they are effective. Within the community of comedians, it hurts to be accused of stealing a joke. In some cases, repeat accusations may destroy a showbiz career.

Raustiala and Sprigman recognize that the prevalence of such phenomena undermines one of the standard arguments for copyright protection:

What does this all mean? The story of stand-up tells us that... the law is not always necessary to foster creativity. Using informal group norms and sanctions, comedians are able to control joke-stealing. Without the intervention of copyright law, comedians are able to assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.
This presents a challenge to the conventional economic rationale for intellectual property rights. Absent legal protection, the usual theory goes, there will be too few creative works produced — authors and inventors would be unlikely to recoup their cost of creation, so they won’t bother creating in the first place. As we have described, there is no effective legal protection against joke theft. Yet thousands of stand-ups keep cranking out new material night after night. In the absence of law, we find anti-theft norms providing comedians with a substantial incentive to innovate. Which leads to an important and fascinating question: Where else might creativity norms effectively stand in for legal rules?

In fact, one could ask an even broader question: in which other areas of economic and social life might norms (backed by decentralized sanctions) operate as effective substitutes for legal institutions?

This question lies at the heart of the lifelong work of Elinor Ostrom, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, whose contributions I discussed in in a couple of earlier posts. Using an eclectic mix of methodological approaches, including case studies, laboratory experiments, and game theoretic models, Ostrom managed to overturn conventional wisdom regarding the "tragedy of the commons." She demonstrated the possibility of self-governance when a well-defined group of users with collective rights to an economically valuable resource were at liberty to develop their own rules, and to ostracize, expel, or otherwise sanction each other for violations. 

While Ostrom's focus was on natural resources such as forests, fisheries, and pastures, her basic insights have more general relevance. For instance, institutions of self-governance are critically important in the case of urban communities that lie largely outside the reach of the formal legal system in the United States. There are parts of the country where residents do not have recourse to the courts to adjudicate contractual and other disputes. Given the very high costs of violence as an enforcement mechanism, norms backed by limited community sanctions can therefore play a crucial role.

Sudhir Venkatesh provides a number of vivid examples of this phenomenon in Off the Books, his first-hand account of a Chicago community that functions with limited direct reliance on the police, courts, banks or government agencies. In order to do so, it must draw upon on its own informal substitutes for formal institutions. There is extensive use of barter and in-kind payments for wages and debt settlement, reciprocal lending agreements for insurance, and informal mechanisms for the resolution of disputes and the assignment of property rights. As in the local commons studied by Ostrom, norms sustained by the threat of sanctions allow a broad range of mutually beneficial transactions to occur without formal contracts backed by the power of the state.

The kinds of norms and enforcement mechanisms identified by Ruastiala and Sprigman (and Ostrom and Venkatesh) are pervasive. Many more examples may be found in an extraordinary volume edited by Daniel Bromley. Included among these is a study of sea tenure in Bahia by Cordell and McKean in which the authors describe a system of ethical codes "far more binding on individual conscience than government regulations could ever be." Such codes also crop up in James Acheson's work on the lobster gangs of Maine, E. Somanathan's account of forest resource management in Central Himalaya, and literally hundreds of other studies, enough to fill a two volume bibliography and more.

Norms not only accomplish the goals of laws, they can often do so more efficiently. The erosion of norms (or the prohibition of the sanctions that stabilize them) can therefore be costly, even if formal laws are enacted to take their place. Since laws can sometimes undermine and sometimes reinforce informal codes of conduct, finding the right balance between norms and laws is not an easy task. I suspect that legal scholars are acutely aware of such tensions, but (to my knowledge) these trade-offs have received limited attention in economics.

    Posted by on Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 01:35 AM in Economics, Regulation | Permalink  Comments (69)


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