Work

On Perverse and Second-Order Punishment in Public Goods Experiments with Decentralized Sanctioning

Year: 2004

Type: preprint

Abstract: The fact that many people take it upon themselves to impose costly punishment on free riders helps to explain why collective action sometimes succeeds despite the prediction of received theory.But while individually imposed sanctions lead to higher contributions in public goods experiments, there is usually little or no net efficiency gain from them, because punishment is costly and at times misdirected.We document the frequency and probable causes of punishment of high contributors in several recent studies, and we report a new experiment which shows that introducing higher-order punishment opportunities offer a partial solution to the problem, but also reveal the deep-seatedness of retaliatory tendencies.

Source: RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

Authors: Matthias Cinyabuguma, Talbot Page, Louis Putterman

Language: English

Topic: Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, Brown University

Award: Cooperation, Sanctions, and Strategy in On-Shot and Finitely Repeated Prisoners' Dilemmas: Experiments with the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism with Punishment

OpenAlex ID: W3126001244

Cites:

Cited by: 37

Related to: 10