The economy of favors

This post is triggered by two coincident events: a post last week by David D. Friedman, and the SCA Board of Directors' recent revival of the proposal to require paid membership to participate in SCA activities.

Dan Ariely's recent book Predictably Irrational addresses, from a behavioral psychologist's perspective, a number of ways in which real human beings, consistently and predictably, do not behave like the "rational choosers" of economics. I recommend reading the whole book, but the chapter that's relevant here is entitled "The Cost of Social Norms". In a nutshell, Ariely divides human interactions into those governed by "social norms" and those governed by "market norms": in the former, people do "favors" for one another, perhaps in the hope of receiving future favors in return, but not immediately, not necessarily, and not measured precisely, while in the latter, people expect to "get what they pay for," now, no more and no less.

( Examples and experiments )

( So how does this apply? )