Abstract
Punishment can stabilize costly cooperation and ensure the success of a common project that is threatened by free-riders. Punishment mechanisms can be classified into pool punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by a paid third party, (e.g. a police system or a sheriff), and peer punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by peers. Which punishment mechanism is preferred when both are concurrently available within a society? In an economic experiment, we show that the majority of subjects choose pool punishment, despite being costly even in the absence of defectors, when second-order free-riders, cooperators that do not punish, are also punished. Pool punishers are mutually enforcing their support for the punishment organization, stably trapping each other. Our experimental results show how organized punishment could have displaced individual punishment in human societies.
Highlights
It has been suggested that large-scale cooperation in humans is maintained because wrongdoers are punished [1,2], either by ‘peer punishment’ [3 –12], where individuals decide to punish others in a dyadic way, or by ‘pool punishment’ [13 – 18], a kind of tax-paid organization to which punishment is outsourced
Punishment mechanisms can be classified into pool punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by a paid third party, and peer punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by peers
Which punishment mechanism is preferred when both are concurrently available within a society? In an economic experiment, we show that the majority of subjects choose pool punishment, despite being costly even in the absence of defectors, when secondorder free-riders, cooperators that do not punish, are punished
Summary
It has been suggested that large-scale cooperation in humans is maintained because wrongdoers are punished [1,2], either by ‘peer punishment’ [3 –12], where individuals decide to punish others in a dyadic way, or by ‘pool punishment’ [13 – 18], a kind of tax-paid organization to which punishment is outsourced. We sometimes use peer punishment by personally reprimanding wrongdoers [27], a rare event in modern societies as we hardly ever observe commuters assaulting fare-dodgers or tax-payers affronting defrauders. In his Leviathan, Hobbes [28] suggested that the consent of people could lead to a central authority that punishes those who violate the laws of the society. At present times, these central authorities are institutions such as the police, to which punishment has been outsourced.
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