Understanding the fundamental patterns and determinants of human cooperation and the maintenance of social order in human societies is a challenge across disciplines. The existing empirical evidence for the higher levels of cooperation when altruistic punishment is present versus when it is absent systematically ignores the institutional competition inherent in human societies. Whether punishment would be deliberately adopted and would similarly enhance cooperation when directly competing with nonpunishment institutions is highly controversial in light of recent findings on the detrimental effects of punishment. We show experimentally that a sanctioning institution is the undisputed winner in a competition with a sanction-free institution. Despite initial aversion, the entire population migrates successively to the sanctioning institution and strongly cooperates, whereas the sanction-free society becomes fully depopulated. The findings demonstrate the competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions and exemplify the emergence and manifestation of social order driven by institutional selection.

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Endogenously chosen punishment institutions perform well in increasing contributions and long-term payoffs in social dilemma situations. However, they suffer from (a) initial reluctance of subjects to join the punishment institution and (b) initial efficiency losses due to frequent punishment. Here, we investigate the effects of social learning on the acceptence and the efficieny of a peer punishment institution in a community choice experiment. Subjects choose between communities with and without the possibility to punish peers before interacting in a repeated social dilemma situation. We find that providing participants with a social history -presenting the main results of an identical previous experiment conducted with different subjects -decreases the initial reluctance towards the punishment institution significantly. Moreover, with social history, cooperative groups reach the social optimum more rapidly and there is lower efficiency loss due to reduced punishment. Our findings shed light on the importance of social learning for the acceptance of seemingly unpopular but socially desirable mechanisms.

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Abstract:We explore the eects of the provision of an information-processing instrumentpayo tables -on behavior in experimental oligopolies. In one experimental setting, subjects have access to payo tables whereas in the other setting they have not. It turns out that this minor variation in presentation has non-negligible eects on participants' behavior, particularly in the initial phase of the experiment. In the presence of payo tables, subjects tend to be more cooperative.As a consequence, collusive behavior is more likely and quickly to occur.

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