ICES Seminar in Experimental Economics and Game Theory
Behavioral Self-Management and the Strategic Shifting of Fairness Norms
Friday, October 17, 2025 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), 5183
The ICES Seminar in Experimental Economics and Game Theory of the Fall 2025 semester will feature:
Stephan Tontrup
New York University School of Law
Behavioral Self-Management and the Strategic Shifting of Fairness Norms
Abstract
In many situations, people act prosocially and conform to norms to avoid the self- and social-image costs of violating a social norm. This has given rise to the idea that the law need not always resort to formal sanctions, which are more socially costly. We argue that individuals cannot be assumed to reliably constrain their self-interest to conform to social and legal norms outside the lab to the degree to which earlier laboratory evidence has suggested. We show evidence that individuals can strategically alter their normative decision-making environment in ways that allow them to advance their self-interest without incurring the self-image or social-image costs associated with norm violation. We refer to this strategy as behavioral self-management (BSM).
We test the BSM hypothesis by focusing on one specific strategy: norm-shifting. In a modified dictator game, Allocators receive an endowment to divide between themselves and Recipient. Before making this decision, they are offered the opportunity to perform an effort task; it has been shown that people generally agree that those who undertake effort deserve more than those who do not. We hypothesize that Allocators who feel constrained by fairness norms will engage in work, using the task as a way to change the decision-making environment to shift the applicable norm from equal distribution to an effort-based rule that justifies keeping more.
In our experiments, we find that many Allocators choose to work. Moreover, consistent with our theory, those with stronger social preferences—that is, those who would face higher costs from violating the norm—are more likely to work. Working Allocators transfer less than they would if they had no work option, but, consistent with our theory, they do not retain more than they believe others would consider fair given that they undertook effort, thereby enabling them to keep more without experienced higher expected social image costs. Moreover, we find on average they also should not actually have higher social image costs as their transfers align with third-parties’ actual beliefs about fair transfers given the effort invested. This alignment with others’ beliefs is opposed to cognitive mechanisms such as self-serving bias or deliberate use of wiggle room. Both self-image and social-image concerns drive the decision to work and are mitigated by the shift to the effort-based norm. Finally, we find that Allocators engage in BSM without incurring higher self-image costs even when third-parties know that they elected to work voluntarily.
Our results add to the evidence that we have developed in prior work that people strategically engage in BSM to promote self-interest.
For more information about the Seminar Series, please visit the Seminar Schedule homepage.
