Trick or Treat? Econ Ed Month Meets Halloween

In combination with October being Econ Ed Month and the arrival of Halloween 2023 in just a few days, Turner Business decided to produce a couple of blogs dealing with Halloween-related research affiliated with the Turner College's Center for Economic Education, which is led by Turner College economist Frank Mixon. Both of these studies involve the trick-or-treating tradition that characterizes the last day of October each year. The first extends a 1996 book titled Accounting for Tastes by 1992 Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker (1930-2014) that discusses the usefulness of societal norms, which are those common values of a group that influence an individual’s behavior in ways that reduce the need to spend both public and private resources on the protection of property. Until Becker’s book there was no generally accepted approach to the growth and decay of societal norms. 

     Mixon and his coauthors Tessa Pousson of Loyola University - New Orleans and Jared Loftus of the University of Southern Mississippi published a 2005 article appearing in Applied Economics Letters that explores the decay of social norms using an economic model of the production of social order in the context of edicts employed by cities/municipalities that govern trick-or-treating activities on Halloween. More specifically, the article examines the factors that lead modern-day city mayors and/or city councils to issue edicts regarding the “rules” for trick-or-treating (e.g., start time, end time, age limit, etc.) on Halloween when their political predecessors relied on social norms to govern trick-or-treating. The analysis suggests that such edicts are more likely to occur in densely-populated cities, cities with more heterogeneous populations, cities with higher proportions of single-parent families, and cities with higher home ownership rates. At the time of the study, almost 20 percent of U.S. cities employed these trick-or-treating edicts. Clearly, then, norms and social conventions can and do erode (i.e., lose their effectiveness).