Abstract
This paper reports an experiment which compares behaviour in two punishment regimes: (i) a standard public goods game with punishment in which subjects are given the opportunity to punish other group members (democratic punishment regime) and (ii) a public goods game environment where all group members exogenously experience an automatic reduction of their income (irrespective of their behaviour) and are given the opportunity to alleviate the automatic penalty (undemocratic punishment regime). We employ a within-subjects design where subjects experience both environments and control for order effects by alternating their sequence. Our findings indicate that average contributions and earnings in the undemocratic punishment environment are significantly lower relative to the standard public goods game with punishment. We also observe that in the undemocratic environment average contributions decay over time only when subjects have experienced the standard public goods game with punishment. As a result, alleviation is significantly less when subjects have experienced the standard public goods game with punishment compared to when they do not have such experience. However, the assignment of punishment is robust irrespective of the order in which the games are played.
Highlights
A central theme in the behavioural sciences is the examination of the ability of punishment regimes, where sanctioning is assigned endogenously by group members to their peers, to regulate self-interested behaviour in social dilemma games
To generate an undemocratic punishment regime, we propose a variant of the standard punishment game, which we refer to as the “default punishment game”
Subjects are given the opportunity to alleviate the automatic penalty from others by assigning adjustment points to them
Summary
A central theme in the behavioural sciences is the examination of the ability of punishment regimes, where sanctioning is assigned endogenously by group members to their peers, to regulate self-interested behaviour in social dilemma games (as in [1,2]) We refer to these environments as “democratic punishment regimes”. Numerous laboratory experiments on public goods have shown that such democratic punishment regimes foster high cooperation rates (for recent overviews, see [3,4]) This cooperation enhancing effect has been found to be sensitive to a number of factors, such as low effectiveness of punishment (see [5,6,7,8]), second-round punishment opportunities (see [9,10,11]), and antisocial punishment (see [4,12,13]). The aim of this paper is to explore experimentally how subjects respond in a democratic punishment regime when they have experience with an undemocratic punishment regime and vice versa
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