Social Norms and Games

Dear Colleagues,

One prominent approach to the understanding of social behaviour, that is increasingly attracting economists’ attention, relies on the concept of social norms compliance: human beings have an intrinsic preference to conform to what is collectively perceived as “socially appropriate” behaviour in a given context, and are willing to sacrifice material gain in order to choose actions that are viewed as appropriate and to avoid inappropriate actions. Crucially, what constitutes appropriate behaviour depends on, and can systematically be affected by, social and contextual influences.

Despite a long tradition of research on norms in philosophy, sociology and social psychology, this approach has received relatively little attention in economics. Recently, economists have renewed their interest in norms, attempting to formalise their theoretical underpinnings and measure their predictive power. However, substantial gaps remain in our understanding of norms and their influence on social behaviour, leaving scope for significant advancements of the knowledge frontier in this field.

This Special Issue is intended to encourage these developments. We list below further keywords that may help to identify suitable topics for the Special Issue. Papers may be theoretical or empirical. To support open, reproducible research, empirical papers should include a power analysis and make all data available on publication.

Dr. Daniele Nosenzo
Dr. Silvia Sonderegger
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Games is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.