Legitimate punishment, feedback, and the enforcement of cooperation

Abstract

In dealing with peer punishment as a cooperation enforcement device, laboratory studies have typically concentrated on discretionary sanctioning, allowing players to castigate each other arbitrarily. While such 'vigilante justice' turns out to enhance cooperation when retaliation is prohibited, this comes at a substantial cost, as welfare levels are usually low. By contrast, in real life punishments are often meted out only insofar as punishers are entitled to punish and punishees deserve to be punished. We provide an experimental test for this 'legitimate punishment' institution in the framework of a public goods game, by comparing it with a discretionary punishment mechanism. Our findings show that, despite the lack of additional monetary incentives and the risk to produce motivation crowding-out effects on subjects' propensity to cooperate, the introduction of legitimate punishment leads to substantial efficiency gains. Further, players' earnings are significantly higher. We also focus on the role of feedback and we interestingly find that removing the information over high contributors' choices only leads to a dramatic decline in cooperation rates and earnings. This interaction result implies that providing feedback over virtuous behavior in the group is necessary to make an institution based on legitimate punishment effective.

Anger Management: Aggression and Punishment in the Provision of Public Goods

“…In the next section, 20 Following [16], we find the following levels of antisocial punishment by treatment.…”

“…Previous work has shown that there are a number of ways to increase the effectiveness of punishment by increasing the severity of punishment [8], coordinating punishment through a centralized mechanism [9][10][11][12], eliminating counter-punishment [13][14][15], eliminating antisocial punishment [16] or by allowing a longer timeline for learning how to use punishment [4]. In this paper, we propose using emotion regulation to increase the effectiveness of punishment.…”

“…However, Figure 4 shows that the difference in the use of punishments by type of instructions falls over time for both types. This may be partially driven by changes in public contributions over time as illustrated in Figure 3 16 . Figure 5 shows the effect of the objective instructions on the number of punishment points assigned from a random effects regression that controls for group level public good provision.…”

“…One particular type of punishment that has been shown to be harmful to net earnings is antisocial punishment [16,[44][45][46]. Antisocial punishment is punishment assigned to contributors rather than free-riders.…”

“…Antisocial punishment is punishment assigned to contributors rather than free-riders. The work in [16] defines weak antisocial punishment as occurring when a subject i assigns punishment points to subject j, but subject j's public contribution was greater than or equal to subject i's contribution. Using this measure, we found that under the natural instructions, 34% of punishments by high aggression types are antisocial, but only 19% are antisocial for low aggression types.…”