No smoking here: compliance differences between legal and social norms

The values shared within a society influence the (social) behaviour of the agents in that society. In this paper we focus on the effect of norms on behaviour, taking into account the different types of norms: implicit norms that emerge among the people, norms that are explicitly imposed on the community (by a governing body) on the other, and norms that agents develop privately over their lives (by being part of different communities and having certain experiences). This last type can be seen as a sort of default behaviour of an agent. We will refer to these three types as social, legal and private norms respectively. In particular, we study the difference in conforming to social conventions versus complying with explicitly given laws (with penalties). This is partly motivated from an interest in the design of new governance models for socio-technological systems, which aim to include elements of self-regulation. The work in this paper extends current work on multiagent models for norm compliance, e.g. [1, 2]. We validate our model using the framework of Hofstede on national cultures [3].