Punishment, counterpunishment and sanction enforcement in a social dilemma experiment

Abstract

We present the results of an experiment that explores the sanctioning behavior of individuals who experience a social dilemma. In the game we study, players choose contribution levels to a public good and subsequently have multiple opportunities to reduce the earnings of the other members of the group. The treatments vary in terms of individuals' opportunities to (a) avenge sanctions that have been directed toward themselves, and (b) punish others' sanctioning behavior with respect to third parties. We find that individuals do avenge sanctions they have received, and this serves to decrease contribution levels. They also punish those who fail to sanction third parties, but the resulting increase in contributions is smaller than the decrease the avenging of sanctions induces. When there are five rounds of unrestricted sanctioning, contributions and welfare are significantly lower than when only one round of sanctioning opportunities exists, and welfare is lower than at a benchmark of zero cooperation.

Punishment and spite, the dark side of cooperation

“…The difference between human queues and something like reproductive 'queuing' in fish is that dominance relationships-coercive cooperation-are not needed. Since functional punishment is costly, such as through retaliation against punishers (Denant-Boemont et al 2007;Janssen & Bushman 2008), it makes little sense to punish if there are no direct benefits. Yet people do this routinely, which brings the discussion to a special form of functional punishment.…”

Enforcement of contribution norms in public good games with heterogeneous populations

“…In contrast to homogeneous groups, the experimental evidence regarding contributions to public goods in heterogeneous groups is much less conclusive, 5 and evidence on the enforcement of contribution norms in heterogeneous groups is basically absent. 6 3 The success of informal sanctioning in supporting cooperative behavior has been shown to depend on the costs and effectiveness of the sanctioning (Anderson and Putterman, 2006;Carpenter, 2006;Egas and Riedl, 2008;Masclet and Villeval, 2008;Nikiforakis and Normann, 2008;Sutter et al, 2008), the possibility of taking revenge (Denant-Boemont et al, 2007;Nikiforakis, 2008), availability of information (Carpenter, 2007), communication opportunities (Bochet et al, 2006), and cultural factors (Gächter et al, 2008).…”

Information-sensitive Leviathans

“…2 Related is the problem of retaliation for received punishment. Some studies find that re-taliation weakens decentralized punishment institutions because cooperative individuals are less willing to punish free riders (Denant-Boemont, Masclet, & Noussair, 2007;Nikiforakis, 2008;Nikiforakis, Noussair, & Wilkening, 2012), while others do not find such a general effect (Kamei & Putterman, 2015). Finally, decentralized punishment can become inefficient in increasing contributions when subjects receive only imperfect information about the contributions of others.…”