Abstract
Cooperation is the crux of many social problems, thus third‐party sanction, as one of the most important ways to promote cooperation, is worth studying. The present study compared the effects of third‐party punishment alone, third‐party reward alone, and the combination of third‐party reward and third‐party punishment on cooperation in the context of a public goods experiment. In addition, we explored the characteristics of third‐party sanctioning behaviors. A total of 280 students participated in the present study. The results showed that the operation of third‐party sanctions did raise the level of cooperation and changed the discrete trend of cooperation—specifically, the differences between the cooperation level of every group member and the average level of the whole group. Furthermore, when third‐party rewards and third‐party punishments were used simultaneously in the public goods game (PGG), the level of cooperation was greatly enhanced, which meant that in the context of the third party, when punishment opportunities and reward opportunities coexist, they may have a “compensatory effect.” In terms of the characteristics of sanctioning behaviors, the frequency of third‐party sanctions did not differ significantly under different conditions (third‐party punishment alone, third‐party reward alone, and a combination of third‐party reward and third‐party punishment), and neither did expenditures on third‐party sanctions, but the strategies that third parties used changed under different conditions, thus their effects on other group members’ cooperative behavior varied under different conditions. The present study provides a comprehensive picture of how third parties behave in different conditions of third‐party sanctions and how these sanctions exert influence on cooperation. Understanding these mechanisms can help us build more effective institutions.
Highlights
In human society, economic and social activities relating to the provision of public goods require voluntary cooperation
Through the face value of cooperation in every period and trend in Figure 1, we can see that in the baseline treatment without punishments or rewards, the level of cooperation showed a declining trend—cooperation decreased over time and the level of cooperation was rather low in the final period (M Æ SD = 7.65 Æ 3.46, N = 10)
When it came to the third-party reward (TR) treatment, we found that the trend of cooperation was not similar to that under two other treatments (TP and thirdparty punishment (TP)/R)—the average cooperation level (M Æ SD = 10.33 Æ 3.37, N = 10) under the TR treatment decreased over time
Summary
Economic and social activities relating to the provision of public goods require voluntary cooperation. We note that recently, when investigating cooperation, rather than paying attention almost exclusively to the average level of cooperation, some researchers (Fehr & Gächter, 2000; Sasaki, Brännström, Dieckmann, & Sigmund, 2012; Sefton et al, 2007) have begun to realize the importance of the characteristic of dispersion within cooperation, by paying attention to the question of whether the behaviors of all members concentrated toward cooperation or free riding, for example, or whether the behaviors varied in a more discrete fashion They cared about how far the cooperation levels of individual members deviated from the average cooperation level of the group as a whole. There has been no research yet that has highlighted the discrete trend of cooperation as a special indicator
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