Selfish punishers

Punishment: one tool, many uses

“…Similarly, using a series of social dilemma tasks, Yamagishi and colleagues ( 2012 ) found that the tendency to reject unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game (which has been interpreted as a form of costly punishment owing to strong reciprocity preferences; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003 ; Fehr and Gächter 2002b ; Gintis et al . 2003 ) was unrelated to prosocial behaviour in other games (see also Albrecht et al 2018 ; Brañas-Garza et al 2014 ; Eriksson et al 2014 ; Hoeft and Mill 2017 ; Kriss et al 2016 ; Peysakhovich et al 2014 ). Thus, the preference for cooperation and for punishment does not appear to be as tightly linked as theories based on strong reciprocity preferences imply, and evolutionary simulations on two-player interactions obtain as an outcome of natural selection (Wubs et al .…”

Identifying legitimacy: Experimental evidence on compliance with authority

“…Andreoni and Gee ( 11 , 12 ) study potential benefits of centralized punishment but focus on the potential increases in efficiency that this institution can offer, especially relative to peer-to-peer punishment; this work, however, does not directly address the question of intrinsic motivations to comply with authority. As in this study, Hoeft and Mill ( 13 ) explore a centralized punishment context in which the authority can engage in more or less meritorious behavior; however, they focus on very different measures (e.g., discrepancies between the authority’s punishment choices and his own contribution decisions) and do not distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in shaping citizens’ future contributions. Castillo and Hamman ( 14 ) and Castillo et al .…”

Positional preferences and narcissism: evidence from ‘money burning’ dictator games

“…With this approach, we seek to enhance the understanding of human decision making by combining the strengths of two methodologies: the measurement of revealed (and not merely stated) preferences with the help of an economic game experiment and a comprehensive, differentiated measurement of narcissism and its different dimensions that has been proposed and used in psychological literature. By distinguishing two different dimensions of narcissism, we go beyond previous economic studies that understand narcissism as a one-dimensional construct (e.g., Hoeft and Mill 2017;Yang et al 2018). In addition, by linking positional preferences with narcissism as a personality trait, we follow the call for including personality measures in (experimental) economic research (Borghans et al 2008;Schröder et al 2020;Zhao and Smillie 2015).…”