Social norms and reciprocity

In a norm game, under certain conditions, there exist Nash equilibria of mutual cooperation. Experimental work demonstrates that even in one-shot situations the level and proportion of cooperative behavior increases if an punishment option is available to the players of a public goods game. It is therefore important to analyze conditions such that this is consistent with a rational choice approach. The paper is meant as a first step toward this task. The main result will be that nonstandard assumptions about human motivations or preferences can explain norms with sanctions even in one-shot situations. This is shown by an analysis of the norm game with two well-known recent models of fairness from behavioral game theory.:Introduction; Cooperation in a norm game; Non-standard preferences in the one-shot norm game; Conclusion