Self-governance Through Altruistic Punishment?

Monopolizing Sanctioning Power under Noise Eliminates Perverse Punishment But Does Not Increase Cooperation

“…Experiments on voluntary cooperation repeatedly demonstrate that, compared to an environment without punishment , decentralized, informal, peer-to-peer punishment increases cooperation under perfect information (Yamagishi, 1986 ; Ostrom et al, 1992 ; Fehr and Gächter, 2000 , 2002 ), and welfare in the long run (Gächter et al, 2008 ). Various studies, however, challenge the idea that peer-to-peer punishment generally enhances cooperation (for an overview, see Nikiforakis, 2014 ): for example on the basis of punishment which is targeted at cooperators, referred to as anti-social (Herrmann et al, 2008 ) or perverse punishment (Cinyabuguma et al, 2006 ), or on the basis of counter-punishment (targeted either at the group or the punisher directly as in Nikiforakis, 2008 ; Nikiforakis et al, 2012 ) 1 . If punishment is centralized, however, there is no opportunity for counter punishment and such sources of inefficiency are less likely.…”

Cooperation under Punishment: Imperfect Information Destroys it and Centralizing Punishment Does Not Help

“…Various studies challenge the robustness of these results (for a recent overview, see Nikiforakis 2013): for example, on the basis of punishment that is targeted at cooperators, referred to as anti-social punishment (Herrmann et al 2008), on the basis of counter-punishment (Nikiforakis 2008, Nikiforakis et al 2012) and on the basis of a non-trivial degree of noise regarding contributions, where cooperation decreases significantly and total earnings drops below what is achieved under a regime without any punishment (Grechenig et al 2010, Ambrus andGreiner 2012).…”