Effective social conventions are economical, monitorable, and harsh on violators

Evidence

Why do informal social conventions work to secure our capacity to commit ourselves to trustworthiness? They do so, in part, for the same reasons that organizational devices work. Perhaps the best way to account for such workability is to characterize social conventions that do work. Very often, the rules that can be made to work well are especially economical. They can be simply stated, breaches of them and adherence to them can be easily monitored, and the cost of invoking them bears heavily on the rule breaker and lightly on any sanctioner. In addition, such rules must be relatively stable, so that their effects can be predictably expected into the relevant future. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 245

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides the criteria for workable commitment-enforcing conventions: economy of statement, ease of monitoring, asymmetric cost of sanctioning, and stability.
• XREF: Echoes the Champagne Fairs and diamond-bourse monitoring analyses — institutions work by lowering information/monitoring costs.