ABSTRACT
"Thou shall not steal." Whether or not this was news to the Israelites is unknown to us, but the fact that it has been handed down to us signifies that rales or norms are important in society. Sometimes they are handed down in order to establish a proper social behavior, other times they summarize established proper conduct. One of their functions, we guess, is to restrain egoistic incentives in favor of collective outcomes. To take but one example: tax evasion among Swedish citizens is more determined by beliefs about other citizens" inclination to evade rather than beliefs about actual possibilities to escape discovery (Laurin, 1986). In other words, citizens are guided by a norm concerning proper behavior instead of evaluating how much they can earn from tax evasion.
