“Insiders” – employees within organizations – have been seen as a major problem for information security management. Employees were often found to intentionally violate organizational information security policies despite the possibility of being disciplined for their actions. In this study, we aim to examine the effects of different types of sanctions – organizational, workgroup, and personal ...

Throughout human history, informal sanctions by peers were ubiquitous and played a key role in the enforcement of social norms and the provision of public goods. However, a considerable body of evidence suggests that informal peer sanctions cause large collateral damage and efficiency costs. This raises the question whether peer sanctioning systems exist that avoid these costs and whether other...

Social scientists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, it has been argued, lacked effective legal mechanisms for contract enforcement and instead relied on informal sanctions based on collective ostracism within an exclusive coalition. We show that this claim is untenable. Not a single empirical example adduced as evidence of the putative coaliti...

The Iraqi people have endured an excess burden of morbidity and mortality during the past 15 years due to war and sanctions, with the March 2003 Anglo-American assault on and subsequent occupation of Iraq representing the most recent chapter. Children have been disproportionately affected; many have died from infectious disease, malnutrition, and lack of access to health care. There have been s...

Modern societies rely on both formal and social mechanisms to enforce social norms of behavior. Formal enforcement mechanisms rely on monetary or other tangible incentives while social enforcement mechanisms rely on some form of social judgment involving informal sanctions. We experimentally investigate the extent to which social observability and the possibility of social judgment affect indiv...

Normative environments are used to regulate multi-agent interactions, by providing means for monitoring and enforcing agents’ compliance with their commitments. In business encounters, agents representing business entities make contracts including norms that prescribe what agents should do. Agent autonomy, however, gives agents the ability to decide whether to fulfill or violate their commitmen...

This article suggests to view peer review as a social interaction problem and shows reasons for social simulators to investigate it. Although essential for science, peer review is largely understudied and current attempts to reform it are not supported by scientific evidence. We suggest that there is room for social simulation to fill this gap by spotlighting social mechanisms behind peer revie...

According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The results show that severe sanctions almost perfectly deter free-riding. However, people also obey law ba...

debate over whether economic sanctions "work" is mired in a scholarly limbo. One writer contends that recent international relations scholarship has promoted optimism about the utility of such measures and sets out to challenge this trend} while another notes the pessimism that "pervades the sanctions literature" and proceeds to argue that it is unjustified.2 A third scholar cites the sanctions...