Costly Punishment Research Articles

Inhibit violations in business-to-peer product sharing via heterogeneous punishment, firm decisions and subsidies

Violations in business-to-peer (B2P) product sharing such as theft and vandalism may cause firm bankruptcy and social welfare reductions. Taking bike-sharing as an example, this paper develops a non-atomic game model to characterize the collective behaviors of rational consumers and investigates how to inhibit violations in the B2P market. We assume that individuals are heterogeneous in the expected punishment cost, and each individual can choose to be a compliant consumer, violating consumer, or a non-use consumer. The equilibrium results reveal that lowering the price and increasing the initial number of shared products can suppress violations, however, the firm profit is maximized when violators are reduced to a certain percentage, which diverges somewhat from social welfare. To further eliminate violations, the subsidy mechanism is introduced, which can efficiently reduce the ratio of violators while increasing both the firm profit and social welfare, even though the firm’s response to subsidy weakens its effect, and the increase in social welfare exceeds the investment in subsidies.

The evolution of cooperation in voluntary public goods game with shared-punishment

A large number of theoretical and experimental studies have shown that punishment and voluntary participation can promote cooperation, which offers an explanation for the emergence of cooperation. In this paper, individuals can freely choose whether to participate in the public goods game, and cooperators perform both cooperation and punishment. On the one hand, cooperators invest in public goods, and on the other hand, they punish the defectors and share the cost of punishment. Furthermore, considering the impact of population structure, we investigate the evolution of cooperation in well-mixed populations with the replicator dynamics and structured populations with the Fermi update rule, respectively. Our results indicate that the evolution of cooperation is obviously different between the two populations. In well-mixed populations, the voluntary participation mechanism prevents defection from becoming an evolutionary stable strategy. When the fine is low, the strategy of non-participation will be the only evolutionary stable strategy. With the increase of the fine, both cooperation and non-participation will be the evolutionary stable strategies. When the fine is high, cooperation will become the only evolutionary stable strategy. In structured populations, cooperators, defectors and loners can coexist under mild punishment, which means that population structure is favorable to the emergence of cooperation. However, cooperators occupy the population with higher fine threshold compared to well-mixed populations, which indicates that population structure is not always favorable to the evolution of cooperation.

Data-driven evolutionary game models for the spread of fairness and cooperation in heterogeneous networks.

Unique large-scale cooperation and fairness norms are essential to human society, but the emergence of prosocial behaviors is elusive. The fact that heterogeneous social networks prevail raised a hypothesis that heterogeneous networks facilitate fairness and cooperation. However, the hypothesis has not been validated experimentally, and little is known about the evolutionary psychological basis of cooperation and fairness in human networks. Fortunately, research about oxytocin, a neuropeptide, may provide novel ideas for confirming the hypothesis. Recent oxytocin-modulated network game experiments observed that intranasal administration of oxytocin to a few central individuals significantly increases global fairness and cooperation. Here, based on the experimental phenomena and data, we show a joint effect of social preference and network heterogeneity on promoting prosocial behaviors by building evolutionary game models. In the network ultimatum game and the prisoner's dilemma game with punishment, inequality aversion can lead to the spread of costly punishment for selfish and unfair behaviors. This effect is initiated by oxytocin, then amplified via influential nodes, and finally promotes global cooperation and fairness. In contrast, in the network trust game, oxytocin increases trust and altruism, but these effects are confined locally. These results uncover general oxytocin-initiated mechanisms underpinning fairness and cooperation in human networks.

Reciprocal, but inequality averse as well? Mixed motives for punishment and reward

Considerable experimental evidence indicates that reciprocity and inequality aversion are important motivations to understand deviations from self-interested behavior, and in particular costly punishment and reward. We use a within-subject experimental design to evaluate the share of subjects whose second-party reward and punishment choices are best accounted for by pure reciprocity, pure inequality aversion, a mixture of these two motives, or other motivations like altruism or competitiveness. We find that the largest fraction of punishment and rewards is motivated by a mixture of both inequality aversion and reciprocity, while smaller fractions are primarily motivated by pure inequality aversion and pure reciprocity. These findings provide new insights into the literature on other-regarding preferences and may help to organize some results in the experimental literature on second-party punishment and reward.

Deterrence through punishment can resolve collective risk dilemmas in carbon emission games.

Collective risk social dilemmas are at the heart of the most pressing global challenges we are facing today, including climate change mitigation and the overuse of natural resources. Previous research has framed this problem as a public goods game (PGG), where a dilemma arises between short-term interests and long-term sustainability. In the PGG, subjects are placed in groups and asked to choose between cooperation and defection, while keeping in mind their personal interests as well as the commons. Here, we explore how and to what extent the costly punishment of defectors is successful in enforcing cooperation by means of human experiments. We show that an apparent irrational underestimation of the risk of being punished plays an important role, and that for sufficiently high punishment fines, this vanishes and the threat of deterrence suffices to preserve the commons. Interestingly, however, we find that high fines not only avert freeriders, but they also demotivate some of the most generous altruists. As a consequence, the tragedy of the commons is predominantly averted due to cooperators that contribute only their "fair share" to the common pool. We also find that larger groups require larger fines for the deterrence of punishment to have the desired prosocial effect.

Optimization Model and Algorithm of Logistics Vehicle Routing Problem under Major Emergency

The novel coronavirus pandemic is a major global public health emergency, and has presented new challenges and requirements for the timely response and operational stability of emergency logistics that were required to address the major public health events outbreak in China. Based on the problems of insufficient timeliness and high total system cost of emergency logistics distribution in major epidemic situations, this paper takes the minimum vehicle distribution travel cost, time cost, early/late punishment cost, and fixed cost of the vehicle as the target, the soft time window for receiving goods at each demand point, the rated load of the vehicle, the volume, maximum travel of the vehicle in a single delivery as constraints, and an emergency logistics vehicle routing problem optimization model for major epidemics was constructed. The convergence speed improvement strategy, particle search improvement strategy, and elite retention improvement strategy were introduced to improve the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for it to be suitable for solving global optimization problems. The simulation results prove that the improved PSO algorithm required to solve the emergency medical supplies logistics vehicle routing problem for the major emergency can reach optimal results. Compared with the basic PSO algorithm, the total cost was reduced by 20.09%.

Extreme (and non-extreme) punishments in sender-receiver games with judicial error: An experimental investigation

In many real world situations, decision-makers have the opportunity to punish informed senders for their biased recommendations, while lie-detection is far from perfect. Hence, we conduct an experiment which incorporates ex post punishment and monitoring uncertainty into the discrete sender-receiver game first introduced by Crawford and Sobel, where a knowledgeable sender sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver who determines a policy action. After taking this action, the receiver observes a noisy signal of the true state and can impose a costly punishment on the sender. We vary the strength of punishment from mild (nominal), strong (deterrent) to extreme (potential of losing everything), and vary receiver's signal uncertainty when punishment is extreme. We find that receivers punish less as the strength of punishment increases, which suggests people care more about wrongly punishing innocent senders harsher than not being able to hand liars harsher punishments they deserve. More importantly, the opportunity of punishment encourages receivers to follow senders more and thus improves overall information transmission and utilization, even though senders need not exaggerate less.

ESG and firm performance: The role of size and media channels

Focusing on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors is important as it affects the firm's capability to raise capital and attract investors, and hence, firm performance. However, the role of the size and media channels in explaining the relationship between ESG and firm performance remains under examined. Using data for all firms with ESG scores in G20 countries from 2007 to 2020, we analyze the relationship between the three pillars of ESG scores and firm performance by focusing on the role of these two channels. The firm size channel suggests that larger firms tend to invest into the ESG activities due to economies of scale to better reflect stakeholders' demands. Meanwhile, under the media channel, firms with better media coverage can reduce information asymmetry regarding ESG investments for their stakeholders. As a result, firms can avoid various costs following the stakeholder theory view (e.g., stakeholders' punishment costs), and hence, have better performance.

Adaptive exit facilitates the evolution of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game with punishment

The enforcement of costly punishment can facilitate cooperation. However, it is unclear how punishment would influence cooperation if individuals are free to exit an interaction. In this work, individuals are allowed to exit with a certain probability, which is adaptively adjusted based on the difference between expectations and payoffs. According to simulation results, adaptive exit can significantly improve cooperation even when punishment is weak; moreover, there is an optimal level of aspiration that causes adaptive exit to best promote the evolution of cooperation. Because of reciprocity, cooperative individuals maintain the lowest level of exit probability, allowing the relationship between them to be maintained, and the interaction between cooperative individuals and defectors is affected by adaptive exit processing, which is related to aspiration levels. Results show that cooperation prevails under moderate aspiration levels, because the exit mechanism protects cooperative individuals from exploitation by defectors; however, the exit mechanism does not prevent the invasion of cooperators by defectors when the aspiration level is low. The negative impact of sanctions causes defectors to increase their exit probability, and the exit of the defectors prevents nearby punishers from exploitation as well as reduces the implementation of punishment, thereby easing the punishment burden on the punisher. Therefore, the adaptive exit mechanism helps to eliminate second-order free-riding at a lower aspiration level. The study identifies the significant effects of exit on punishment, and highlights the important role of their association in the evolution of cooperation.

Constraints on cooperation shape hierarchical versus distributed structure in human groups

Some human groups are organized hierarchically and some are distributed. Both types of groups occur in economic, political, and military domains, but it is unclear why hierarchical organizations are favored in certain contexts and distributed organizations are favored in others. I propose that these different organizational structures can be explained by human groups having different constraints on their ability to foster cooperation within the group. Human within-group cooperation is often maintained by monitoring and punishment. In hierarchical groups, monitoring and punishment are organized into tree-like command-and-control structures with supervisors responsible for monitoring the cooperation of their subordinates and punishing non-cooperators. By contrast, in distributed groups, monitoring is diffuse and punishment is collective. I propose that the organization of cooperative human groups is constrained by the costs of monitoring and punishment. I formalize this hypothesis with a model where individuals in a group cooperate to produce public goods while embedded in a network of monitoring and punishment responsibilities. I show that, when punishment costs are high and monitoring costs are low, socially-optimal monitoring and punishment networks are distributed. The size of these distributed networks is constrained by monitoring costs. However, when punishment costs are low, socially-optimal networks are hierarchical. Monitoring costs do not constrain the size of hierarchical networks but determine how many levels of supervision are required to foster cooperation in the hierarchical group. These results may explain the increasingly large and hierarchical groups throughout much of human history. They also suggest that the recent emergence of large-scale distributed organizations has been possible because new technologies, like the internet, have made monitoring costs extremely low.

Neural responses to social decision-making in suicide attempters with mental disorders

BackgroundDecision-making deficits have been reported in suicide attempters and may be a neuropsychological trait of vulnerability to suicidal behavior. However, little is known about how neural activity is altered in decision-making. This study aimed to investigate the neural responses in suicide attempters with mental disorders during social decision-making. Electroencephalography (EEG) were recorded from 52 patients with mental disorders with past suicide attempts (SAs = 26) and without past suicide attempts (NSAs = 26), as well as from 22 age- and sex- matched healthy controls (HCs) during the Ultimatum Game (UG), which is a typical paradigm to investigate the responses to fair and unfair decision-making.MethodsMINI 5.0 interview and self report questionnaire were used to make mental diagnosis and suicide behavior assessment for individuals. Event-related potential (ERP) and phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) were extracted to quantify the neural activity. Furthermore, Spearman correlation and logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify the risk factors of suicidal behavior.ResultsERP analysis demonstrated that SA patients had decreased P2 amplitude and prolonged P2 latency when receiving unfair offers. Moreover, SA patients exhibited greater negative-going feedback-related negativity (FRN) to unfair offers compared to fair ones, whereas such a phenomenon was absent in NSA and HC groups. These results revealed that SA patients had a stronger fairness principle and a disregard toward the cost of punishment in social decision-making. Furthermore, theta-gamma and beta-gamma PAC were involved in decision-making, with compromised neural coordination in the frontal, central, and temporal regions in SA patients, suggesting cognitive dysfunction during social interaction. Statistically significant variables were used in logistic regression analysis. The area under receiver operating characteristic curve in the logistic regression model was 0.91 for SA/HC and 0.84 for SA/NSA.ConclusionsOur findings emphasize that suicide attempts in patients with mental disorders are associated with abnormal decision-making. P2, theta-gamma PAC, and beta-gamma PAC may be neuro-electrophysiological biomarkers associated with decision-making. These results provide neurophysiological signatures of suicidal behavior.

Two-Level Programming Model Based on Cooperative Operation Study of Stakeholders in Hazardous Chemical Storage

Due to the uncertainty of risk occurrence and the severity of accident consequences in the process of hazardous chemical storage, there are many stakeholders involved in the management and supervision of hazardous chemical storage, and their interest appeals are different. On the basis of ensuring storage safety, in order to balance the interests of stakeholders and achieve cooperative operation, a two-level programming model considering the maximization of social welfare and the interests of warehousing enterprises was proposed. First, the upper model mainly refers to the regulatory department represented by the government, including the daily supervision cost, risk loss cost, risk compensation cost, and penalty coefficient formulated by combining various indicators. In the lower model, the comprehensive risk level of the warehouse is determined by the warehouse enterprise. Based on this, the supervision coefficient is determined. Combined with the punishment coefficient, the warehousing operation cost, warehousing supervision cost, and the punishment cost when the accident occurs under different risk levels are determined. The relevant case analysis shows that, compared with the evolutionary game model, the social supervision cost of the upper level and the enterprise cost of the lower level can be reduced by 0.49% and 30.43% respectively. Compared with the traditional improved particle swarm optimization algorithm, the proposed algorithm can reduce the supervision cost of the upper society and the lower enterprise by 0.11% and 7.05%, respectively, thus achieving a better supervision effect at a relatively low cost.

Measuring everyday adaptation after imprisonment: The post-release living inventory for ex-prisoners (PORLI-ex)

BackgroundThe number of ex-prisoners worldwide has constantly been increasing in recent years. Currently, little is known about post-release daily adaptation, not to mention valid and reliable instruments for post-release daily routines pertinent to mental health. ObjectiveThis study aims to develop and validate a self-report instrument, hereafter referred to as Post Release Living Inventory for Ex-prisoners (PORLI-ex). MethodsThree separate samples of ex-prisoners were recruited to complete an online survey (N=1,277, age range=17–89 years, 53.2% male, 72% white). ResultsThe final model evidenced acceptable goodness-of-fit and consisted of 45 items on nine dimensions, which loaded on three second-order factors: Consolidation (three dimensions; e.g., Institutional Routines), Replacement (two dimensions; e.g., Maladaptive Behaviors), and Addition (four dimensions; e.g., Socializing with Ex-prisoner Friends) (α=.695–.915). Convergent validity was demonstrated in the positive correlations with IADL, SOLI, MLQ, GSE-6, and MSPSS. Discriminant validity was demonstrated in the weak correlations with the LEC-5 and perceived social and personal cost of punishment. Criterion-related validity was demonstrated in the correlations with psychiatric symptoms and crime-related outcomes and incremental validity in the correlations with these measures independent of the scores on IADL, SOLI, MLQ, GSE-6, and MSPSS. ConclusionThis study calls for more resources on fostering psychological strengths and resilience through regularizing basic daily life experiences on top of traditional interventions for risk management among the ex-prisoners.

Energy management method of integrated energy system based on collaborative optimization of distributed flexible resources

Under the background of energy internet and low-carbon power, integrated energy system (IES) has become an important carrier of energy conservation and emission reduction. The IES utilizes innovative energy management mode to coordinate various energy sources such as natural gas, electric energy and heat energy. It is composed of energy production, conversion, storage and consumption subsystems, which emphasizes breaking the isolation of energy subsystems through reasonable scheduling, realizing energy cascade utilization and improving energy utilization efficiency. In this paper, an energy management model with two-stage scheduling before day and in real time is proposed aiming at the collaborative optimization of generator-load-storage of IES. Firstly, the first stage is the day-ahead economic dispatch, which aims to realize the power distribution of units in the system. The day-ahead economic dispatching model takes the maximization of economic benefits, the maximization of exergy efficiency and the minimization of carbon emission cost as the optimization objectives, so as to make the day-ahead global optimal dispatching decision. Secondly, the second stage is real-time optimal scheduling, which aims at real-time power adjustment of the previous scheduling plan. The real-time optimal scheduling model takes the minimum interactive power deviation punishment cost, wind abandonment punishment cost and user satisfaction loss cost as optimization objectives, so as to balance the energy supply and load demand deviation between planned output and actual output. Thirdly, according to the characteristics of the model, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) is used to solve the first-stage day-ahead economic scheduling, and YALMIP toolbox is used to solve the real-time optimal scheduling model. Finally, based on the established model, a typical IES is selected for case simulation, which verifies that the proposed method can effectively improve the economy of system operation.

The impact of local gambling preferences on firm‐level environmental violations: Evidence from China

AbstractWe examine the impact of local gambling preferences on firms' environmental violations using a sample of Chinese firms. Our findings suggest that firms in regions with high gambling preferences have higher environmental and continuous environmental violations. The results are robust to using two stage least square (2SLS) regression analysis, a propensity score matching sample, other robustness tests, and excluding alternative explanations of social responsibility and financial pressure. Further analysis shows that the impact of gambling preferences on environmental violations is more salient for firms with high managerial overconfidence and low environmental awareness. Hence, the illusion of control and underestimating the punishment costs are underlying causes.

Potential influence of decision time on punishment behavior and its evaluation.

Previous studies on whether punishers are rewarded by reputational gains have yielded conflicting results. Some studies have argued that punitive behaviors potentially result in a positive evaluation, while others have found the opposite. This study aims to clarify the conditions that lead to the positive evaluation of costly punishment. Study 1 utilized one-round and repeated public goods game (PGG) situations and manipulated decision time for participants’ punitive behavior toward the non-cooperative person in the situation. We also asked participants to report their impression evaluations of punitive behavior toward non-cooperative people. Moreover, utilizing the second- and third-party punishment games, Study 2 manipulated the decision time of participants’ punitive behavior toward the self-interested person and asked them to evaluate the punitive behavior. The results showed that those who punished intuitively were not likely to be evaluated positively. However, punishers were rewarded when the decision to punish was made after deliberation or made by those who were not direct victims. These findings extend previous research on the evaluation of punitive behavior and reveal that deliberative punishment is evaluated positively occasionally.

Costly signals can facilitate cooperation and punishment in the prisoner’s dilemma

Costly signal is regarded as one of the mechanisms to explain the emergence of cooperation. Both the cost of cooperation and the cost of punishment can be seen as expensive cost signals. Previous research has used costly signaling theory to explain the establishment of cooperation and punishment in public goods game. However, punishment is less likely to emerge stably in the prisoner’s dilemma, and the punisher cannot have additional information to identify and punish the defector. Therefore, it is particularly important to further study whether the expensive cost signal in the prisoner’s dilemma can promote the emergence of cooperation and punishment. We distinguish between costly punishing signals and costly cooperative signals in this paper to look at the rule that turns payoff into fitness. The findings reveal that, without punishment, if the costly signal is weak and the cost of cooperation is not too high compared to the benefit of cooperation, cooperation is a better choice than defection. With punishment, if there is a small amount of noise in the costly signaling mechanism and punishment is considered a more expensive signal than cooperation, punishment is a better strategy.

Sending a message or seeking retributive justice? An experimental investigation of why people punish

Two prevailing theories exist to explain why people engage in costly punishment in one-shot interactions when they cannot expect to gain from the punishment or to affect future behavior: to achieve balance or to send a message. In this paper we constructed new versions of the Dictator, Public Good, and Power-to-Take games, designed specifically to allow us to differentiate between these explanations. The results lend some support to each of the hypotheses; on the one hand, subjects punish even when the punisher knows that the offender will never learn that he was punished, and, on the other hand, there is more punishment when the punisher knows that the offender will be informed that he is being punished than when the punisher knows that the offender will remain oblivious to the punishment. Thus, punishers seek both "retributive justice" and to "send a message" to the offending party.

Varieties of normative understanding and their relation to sharing behavior in preschool children

Children increasingly appreciate normative obligations and share resources across the preschool years. But the internal structure and behavioral relevance of normative expressions in the context of sharing—that is, the relation with children’s own sharing behavior—remains disputed. Here, 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 90; 37 female) observed protagonists sharing or not sharing resources. As measures of normative expressions, children’s evaluation, punishment acceptability, non-costly punishment, and costly punishment of the protagonists as well as their moral self-concept were assessed. To measure actual prosocial behavior, children had the possibility to share resources. A factor analysis revealed that the variety of normative expressions constitutes two distinct factors: normative representation (evaluation and hypothetical punishment) and norm enforcement (actual non-costly and costly punishment). Children’s moral self-concept was the only normative expression that related to sharing behavior. Person-centered analyses suggest some consistency in individual differences across normative and prosocial development, with normative expressions and sharing behavior being aligned for some children on a low level and for some children on a high level. This study advances our understanding of early normative development and highlights the internal structure of normative stances during the preschool years.

Suffering saviors: Relationships between perceptions of interpersonal victimhood, the vigilante identity, and the monitoring and punishment of norm violators

Vigilantes are people who monitor their environment for signs of wrongdoing and administer unauthorized punishment on perceived norm violators. We propose that one reason people become vigilantes is because they perceive themselves to have been victimized in their interpersonal relationships. These experiences can lead them to construct a vigilante identity organized around the imperative to punish perceived wrongdoers. We test this theoretical model in four studies. Study 1 shows that individual differences in the adoption of a vigilante identity predicts punishment tendencies in an ecologically relevant context. Studies 2 and 3 show the associations between the tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV) and the tendency to monitor online communities for signs of wrongdoing (Study 2) and delivery of costly punishment (Study 3), as mediated by the self-identification of being a vigilante. Study 4 tests the generalizability of our findings in a field setting and examines whether our model applies to the phenomenon of “shadow vigilantism”. We found consistent support for our hypotheses across all studies. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.