Taking punishment into your own hands: An experiment

Abstract

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

“…The work in [6] shows that subjects will use non-monetary disapproval messages to punish free-riders, and they suggest that the use of such messages is a means of expressing anger with free-riders. The work in [17] finds that subjects will pay for the right to assign punishment to free-riders personally rather than let someone else do the punishing. Additionally, [14] find that punishment of a non-cooperator by another subject is not a substitute for one's own punishment of that non-cooperator.…”

“…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. We use a random effects model to account for each subject playing 10 periods, and we use standard errors clustered at the group level to account for groups interacting over 10 periods 17 . Using this preferred specification, we find that for low aggression types, the objective emotion regulation instructions result in a statistically-significant decrease of 0.43 punishment points, about a 74% decline from the mean for low aggression types using natural instructions ( −0.43 0.58 = −0.74).…”

“…The objective emotion regulation instructions reduce the use of punishments more for low than high aggression types, although this difference is not statistically significant. 17 The regression results are in Appendix Table A1 along with the results from alternative specifications that do not control for group contribution, using a Tobit model, and these same models without clustered standard errors. 18 Here and elsewhere below, we calculated Cohen's d for key comparisons as the standardized mean difference between the objective and natural conditions averaged across periods within each aggression type (absolute value).…”

Bidding for nothing? The pitfalls of overly neutral framing

“…In fact, this is due to our reusing the data from an experiment with a very different research question: whether subjects are willing to bid to personally punish (Duersch and Müller, 2013). However, auction C is not the main interest here.…”

“…A full description of the instructions and test questions can be found in the online appendix: http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/professuren/with2/Duersch -Mueller-BfN-appendix.zip and in Duersch and Müller (2013). task. Afterwards, the non-bidding subjects had the choice to allocate the earnings from that task either fully to the bidding subjects, who worked, or to take 80% of the earnings for themselves and leave the bidding subjects with just 20%.…”