Crime and Punishment in Gourmet Cuisine Kitchens
Social norms are thought to be an effective substitute for legal intellectual property rights in industries where innovation is paramount but protection is absent or difficult to enforce. High-end fashion, academia, performing arts, and software are egregious examples. A valuable insight into how social sanctions work comes from a paper by Gianmario Verona (Department of Management and Technology), Giada Di Stefano (HEC Paris) and Andrew King (Dartmouth College) focused on gourmet cuisine: Sanctioning in the Wild: Rational Calculus and Retributive Instincts in Gourmet Cuisine (Academy of Management Journal, 2015, Vol. 58, No. 3, 906-931, doi:10.5465/amj.2012.1192).
Social norms seem to work in largely unexpected ways, according to the study, which uses exploratory qualitative evidence (23 in-person interviews to gourmet cuisine chefs) to inform authors' understanding of the motives that push people to administer sanctions and then tests the resulting hypotheses through a scenario-based experiment administered to all chefs included in the Italian edition of the Michelin Guide (with 534 surveys returned complete).
The exchange of knowledge among chefs is regulated by well-defined social norms. When a chef transfers knowledge about a recipe or a cooking technique to a colleague, three social commandments apply: the colleague (1) will not copy exactly the recipe or cooking technique, but will use it as a source of inspiration to create something new; (2) will cite the source of inspiration for an adapted recipe by including the original chef's name in its menu entry; and (3) will not pass the information on to a third party without previously asking for permission to the original chef. "Norms in the industry", the authors write, "help encourage exchange by regulating when and how chefs can use transferred knowledge. These norms provide 'mental copyrights' that encourage innovation and exchange".
When, nonetheless, violations occur, three types of sanctions are commonly inflicted: (1) refusing future knowledge transfers; (2) cutting off material exchanges, including help with missing ingredients or personnel; (3) sharing negative gossip with colleagues in the community.
Verona and colleagues find that sanctioning doesn't automatically proceed from norm violation. Chefs usually choose to sanction based on a rational calculus, because sanctioning comes with a social cost, and some violators are more likely to get away with it. While theory predicts that a community should endorse sanctioning in case of social norms violations, in real life (the "in the wild" of the article's title) chefs rate community response as the main cost: other chefs are more likely than expected to interpret a sanction as a violation rather than as a way to reestablish social order. The reputation of the violator is the main feature affecting propensity to sanction: when the violator is a well-reputed chef, the propensity that he will be sanctioned decreases by 17.2%.
Competition (intended as physical proximity) is another relevant consideration, with physically proximate violators being more likely to be sanctioned by 18.4%.
Rationality can be set apart in case of severe violations. "We witnessed cases in which our informants seemed to completely forget rational calculus and simply become inflamed by a norm violation. Severe violations seemed particularly likely to trigger an emotional response", write the authors. The most instinctive reactions are observed in case of violations regarding recipes, in particular those of a chef' signature dishes, as opposed to violations regarding cooking techniques, which are "invisible" to most consumers and critics.
An unexpected and perverse consequence of the perceived cost of sanctioning is the limitation to knowledge sharing. If chefs foresee that a knowledge transfer will end up with a violation that they will feel like sanctioning, they prefer not to transfer knowledge altogether, so to avoid incurring in the social costs associated to the administration of sanctions. Results from the scenario-based experiment show a 18.2% drop in the propensity to transfer knowledge when the propensity to sanction is above its median level.