Simple Games in a Complex World: A Generative Approach to the Adoption of Norms

A key issue for law is defining its limits, understanding what the boundaries of law are and need to be.When must we regulate?When instead will behavior coalesce in an appropriate way without the intervention of law?These are Big Questions, as the recent explosion in the literature on norms-best evidenced by nearly 700 pages of new prose in the May, 1996 University of Pennsylvania Law Review-makes crystal clear.I don't purport to answer these questions here.Instead, I bring to bear a particular methodological approach to these situations, one that may serve as a substantial step beyond the formal tools often used by law professors in examining these questions.The hope is for a much richer feel for the possibilities and risks in these situations.We should be clear upfront about what this paper will and will not generate.This is a paper about norm competition, about the circumstances under which one norm will drive out a second norm or the conditions that will allow two norms to co-exist in a stable outcome.Put differently, this paper investigates the scope of collective action problems in the adoption of social norms.I will generate a wide variety