Legitimate Punishment, Feedback, and the Enforcement of Cooperation

In real life, punishment is often implemented only insofar as punishers are entitled to punish and punishees deserve to be punished. We provide an experimental test for this principle of legitimacy in the framework of a public goods game, by comparing it with a classic (unrestricted) punishment institution. A significant advantage of our institution is that it rules out antisocial punishment, a phenomenon which recent studies document to play a key role in undermining the scope for self-governance. Our findings show that, despite the lack of additional monetary incentives to cooperate, the introduction of legitimate punishment leads to substantial efficiency gains, in terms of both cooperation and earnings. Therefore, in businesses and other organizations, this device could successfully deal with the principal-agent problem, with the principal delegating a task to a team of agents. Further, we interestingly find that removing the information over high contributors’ choices only leads to a dramatic decline in cooperation rates and earnings. This result implies that providing feedback over virtuous behavior is necessary to make an institution based on legitimate punishment effective.Experimental Economics, Public Good Games, Costly Punishment, Cooperation, Legitimacy, Immunity

Antisocial punishment in two social dilemmas

The effect of sanctions on cooperation depends on social and cultural norms. While free riding is kept at bay by altruistic punishment in certain cultures, antisocial punishment carried out by free riders pushes back cooperation in others. In this paper we analyze sanctions in both a standard public goods game with a linear production function and an otherwise identical social dilemma in which the minimum contribution determines the group outcome. Experiments were run in a culture with traditionally high antisocial punishment (Southern Europe). We replicate the detrimental effect of antisocial sanctions on cooperation in the linear case. However, we find that punishment is still widely effective when actions are complementary: the provision of the public good significantly and substantially increases with sanctions, participants punish significantly less and sanctions radically transform conditional cooperation patterns to generate significant welfare gains

ECONOMIC COOPERATION IN TURKISH CULTURE: PUBLIC GOODS GAMES AND LONELY ELEPHANTS

While the public good experiment has been used to analyze cooperation among various groups in Western Europe and North America, it has not been extensively used in other contexts such as Turkey. This project seeks to rectify that and explore how Turkish university students informally self govern. By employing the public good experiment among a cohort of students attending universities in Ýzmir, Turkey and Adýyaman, Turkey, we hope to quantitatively analyze the factors which lead to altruistic punishment, to antisocial punishment, and ultimately to enhanced cooperation in Turkish society.Cooperation, Free Riding, Altruism, Punishment, Trust, Experimental Economics, Public Good Experiments

Ostracism and Common Pool Resource Management in a Developing Country: Young Fishers in the Laboratory

This paper investigates how the possibility to ostracise, which is a familiar punishment mechanism to subjects in an experiment, affects harvest in a common pool resource experiment. The experiment was framed as a fishing problem and the subjects were young fishers in Ghana. We find that the introduction of the possibility to ostracise other members of a group at a cost to the remaining members of a group decreased over-fishing significantly in comparison with the situation where ostracism was not possible. The ostracism was based on at least 50 percent voting rule. Moreover, the subjects demonstrated a strong desire to ostracise those who overfished.Common Pool Resource; Experiment; Ostracism; Fishers

Mixing the Carrots with the Sticks: Are Punishment and Reward Substitutes

This paper presents evidence that the demand for costly norm enforcement can be affected by the availability of the means for enforcing the norm. Participants in a laboratory experiment can reward or punish to enforce a distribution norm. Controlling for the extent of norm violation, we find that demand for costly punishment is lower when participants also have the opportunity to reward norm adherence. Similarly, demand for costly reward is lower when participants can punish norm violations, controlling for the extent of norm adherence. The reason is that participants use reward and punishment to signal their approval and disapproval. The availability of reward opportunities allows them to signal their disapproval by withholding reward. Similarly, the availability of punishment opportunities allows them to signal their approval by withholding punishment. This suggests that individuals consider reward and punishment to be substitutes. The resultant reduction in costly enforcement does not affect adherence to the norm, but has a significant impact on earnings in the experiment.punishment; reward; social norms; norm enforcement; third party

The Build-up of Cooperative Behavior among Non-cooperative Agents

We develop a theoretical model in which each individual is, in some ultimate sense, motivated by purely egoistic satisfaction derived from the goods accruing to him, but there is an implicit social contract such that each performs duties for the others in a way that enhances the satisfaction of all. We introduce a state variable that acts as a proxy for social capital of trustworthiness and that we call the stock of cooperation. We show that noncooperative agents might condition their action on this state variable. Agents build-up the society's stock of cooperation and gradually overcome the free riding problem in a game of private contribution to a public good. We assume that there are neither penalties in the sense of trigger strategies, nor guilt and that each individual is rational. Nous développons un modèle théorique dans lequel les individus sont motivés par la satisfaction égoïste que leur procure l’accumulation de biens, mais où le contrat social incite chaque individu à travailler pour les autres afin d’accroître le bien-être collectif. Nous introduisons une variable d’état représentant le stock de capital social, ou « stock de coopération ». Nous démontrons que cette variable peut influencer les actions des agents non-coopératifs. Les agents accumulent le stock de coopération de la société et réussisent à règler de manière progressive le problème du passager clandestin pour un jeu de contributions privées dans un bien public. Nous supposons qu’il n’existe pas de stratégies de pénalité, de sentiment de culpabilité chez les individus et que chaque agent est rationnel.behavior rule, public goods, stock of cooperation, trust, biens public, confiance, règle de conduite, stock de coopération

GROUP SELECTION WITH IMPERFECT SEPARATION - AN EXPERIMENT

We experimentally investigate the effect of imperfect separation of groups on group selection and cooperation in a standard prisoner¿s dilemma environment. Subjects can repeatedly choose between two groups, where in one of them an institutionalized norm fosters cooperation. The degree of separation of the two groups is varied between treatments. We find that both, the share of participants that choose into the group where the norm is implemented and the share of participants that cooperate, rise monotonously with the degree of group separation. Furthermore with higher group separation significantly more subjects support the enforcement of the norm.Experiments, Cooperation, Group Selection, Social Norms, Population Viscosity.

Strategic vs Non-Strategic Motivations of Sanctioning

We isolate strategic and non-strategic motivations of sanctioning in a repeated public goods game. In two experimental treatments, subjects play the public goods game with the possibility to sanction others. In the STANDARD sanctions treatment, each subject learns about the sanctions received in the same round as they were assigned, but in the SECRET sanctions treatment, sanctions are announced only after the experiment is finished, removing in this way all strategic reasons to punish. We find that sanctioning is similar in both treatments, giving support for nonstrategic explanations of sanctions (altruistic punishment). Interestingly, contributions to the public good in both treatments with sanctioning are higher than when the public goods game is played without any sanctioning, irrespective of announcing the sanctions to their receivers during the play of the game, or only after the game is finished. The mere knowledge that sanctions might be assigned increases cooperation: subjects correctly expect that nonstrategic sanctioning takes place against freeriders.altruistic punishment;nonstrategic sanctions;strategic sanctions;public goods;economic experiment