Punishment Institutions Research Articles

The dynamics of human behavior in the public goods game with institutional incentives.

The empirical research on the public goods game (PGG) indicates that both institutional rewards and institutional punishment can curb free-riding and that the punishment effect is stronger than the reward effect. Self-regarding models that are based on Nash equilibrium (NE) strategies or evolutionary game dynamics correctly predict which incentives are best at promoting cooperation, but individuals do not play these rational strategies overall. The goal of our study is to investigate the dynamics of human decision making in the repeated PGG with institutional incentives. We consider that an individual’s contribution is affected by four factors, which are self-interest, the behavior of others, the reaction to rewards, and the reaction to punishment. We find that people on average do not react to rewards and punishment, and that self-interest and the behavior of others sufficiently explain the dynamics of human behavior. Further analysis suggests that institutional incentives promote cooperation by affecting the self-regarding preference and that the other-regarding preference seems to be independent of incentive schemes. Because individuals do not change their behavioral patterns even if they were not rewarded or punished, the mere potential to punish defectors and reward cooperators can lead to considerable increases in the level of cooperation.

The BRICS: Seeking Privileges by Constructing and Running Multilateral Institutions

How should we think of the decisions made by China and the other BRICS countries to establish a series of new institutions, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS-led New Development Bank (NDB)? Does such activism show that rising powers are embracing or confronting today’s Western-led order? This article argues that rather than analyzing emerging powers’ beliefs about rules and norms, these new institutions can best be understood as a tool to enhance their capacity to gain privileges of leadership, and slowly reduce the United States’ institutional centrality which provides it with a hegemonic privilege. Such privilege is seen to allow states to break the rules without asking for a “permission slip” and without fearing institutional punishment. The proliferation of non-Western institutions would appear to complement existing ones and allow rising powers to engage in forum shopping on a trans-regional level. Such forum shopping for the BRICS would seem to provide advantages, including reducing their dependence on Western-led institutions when they are perceived by the BRICS and others to serve the interests of established powers.

Aggravating Сircumstances. Significance and Correlation with Qualifying Signs

The article explains the aggravating circumstances concept and essence. It shows the correlation between the aggravating circumstances and qualifying signs of crimes and examines the role of aggravating circumstances in sentencing under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The qualifying signs and the aggravating circumstances are treated ambiguously in the doctrine of criminal law. The monographic study of these criminal law institutions in Russia have been carried out on the basis of the voided penal legislation. The analysis of the aggravating circumstance and qualifying signs of the crimes in this article has been done following the latest changes in the criminal legislation of the Russian Federation. During the study of these criminal responsibility differentiation means and punishment individualization 1,000 criminal cases has been studied. Also the mistakes made by the courts using qualifying signs and aggravating circumstances were revealed. The recommendations to improve judicial practice and criminal law were made in this paper based on an analysis of judicial practice. In addition, a comparative analysis of the criminal punishment institution under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the Italian criminal law has been performed. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s7p169

Should Law Keep Pace with Society? Relative Update Rates Determine the Co-Evolution of Institutional Punishment and Citizen Contributions to Public Goods

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the ability to control how quickly legal rules of punishment evolve relative to social behavior that legal punishment regulates. However, at what rate should legal rules evolve relative to society to maximize compliance? We investigate this question by modeling the co-evolution of law and cooperation in a public goods game with centralized punishment. We vary the rate at which States update their legal punishment strategy relative to Citizens’ updating of their contribution strategy and observe the effect on Citizen cooperation. We find that when States have unlimited resources, slower State updating lead to more Citizen cooperation: by updating more slowly, States force Citizens to adapt to the legal punishment rules. When States depend on Citizens to finance their punishment activities, however, we find evidence of a ‘Goldilocks’ effect: optimal compliance is achieved when legal rules evolve at a critical evolutionary rate that is slow enough to force citizens to adapt, but fast enough to enable states to quickly respond to outbreaks of citizen lawlessness.

Punitive preferences, monetary incentives and tacit coordination in the punishment of defectors promote cooperation in humans.

Peer-punishment is effective in promoting cooperation, but the costs associated with punishing defectors often exceed the benefits for the group. It has been argued that centralized punishment institutions can overcome the detrimental effects of peer-punishment. However, this argument presupposes the existence of a legitimate authority and leaves an unresolved gap in the transition from peer-punishment to centralized punishment. Here we show that the origins of centralized punishment could lie in individuals’ distinct ability to punish defectors. In our laboratory experiment, we vary the structure of the punishment situation to disentangle the effects of punitive preferences, monetary incentives, and individual punishment costs on the punishment of defectors. We find that actors tacitly coordinate on the strongest group member to punish defectors, even if the strongest individual incurs a net loss from punishment. Such coordination leads to a more effective and more efficient provision of a cooperative environment than we observe in groups of all equals. Our results show that even an arbitrary assignment of an individual to a focal position in the social hierarchy can trigger the endogenous emergence of more centralized forms of punishment.

Cracking down on bribery

Do crackdowns on bribery impact corrupt behavior in the long run? In this paper we observe the long-run impact of a short-term punishment institution (i.e., a crackdown) on bribery behavior in a lab setting. We conduct lab experiments in two countries with cultures that differ in corruption norms, and which experience very different levels of bribery: the US and Pakistan. Bribery is implemented in the laboratory as a repeated three-player sequential game, consisting of a firm, a government official and a citizen. The design contains three phases: pre-crackdown, crackdown, and post-crackdown. Results show that post-crackdown behavior is not significantly different from pre-crackdown behavior in either country. We conclude that short-term crackdowns may impact behavior in the short run, depending on the strength of the existing corruption norms in the country. More importantly, in our setting crackdowns are completely ineffective in the long run, as corrupt behavior rebounds to pre-crackdown levels.

Why are Heterogenous Communities Inefficient? Theory, History and an Experiment

We examine why heterogenous communities may fail to provide public goods. Current work characterizes sanctioning free-riders as an under-supplied public good. We argue that often free-riders can be punished by the coordinated action of a group. This punishment can be profitable, and need not be undersupplied. But the power to expropriate defectors can also be used to expropriate outgroups. Heterogenous societies may be inefficient because minorities, rather than free-riders, are expropriated. Even if this is not so, groups’ different beliefs about the reasons for expropriation may make the threat of punishment less effective at preventing free-riding. We illustrate our theory with evidence from California mining camps, contemporary India, and US schools. In a public goods experiment using minimal groups and a profitable punishment institution, outgroups were more likely to be punished, and reacted differently to punishment than ingroup members.

A Fine Rule from a Brutish World? An Experiment on Endogenous Punishment Institution and Trust

By means of a laboratory experiment, we study the impact of the endogenous adoption of a collective punishment mechanism within a one-shot binary trust game. The experiment comprises three games. In the first one, the only equilibrium strategy is not to trust, and not to reciprocate. In the second we exogenously introduce a sanctioning rule that imposes on untrustworthy second-movers a penalty proportional to the number of those who reciprocate trust.This generates a second equilibrium where everybody trusts and reciprocates. In the third game, the collective punishment mechanism is adopted through majority-voting. In line with the theory, we find that the exogenous introduction of the punishment mechanism significantly increases trustworthiness, and to a lesser extent also trust. However, in the third game the majority of subjects vote against it: subjects seem to be unable to endogenously adopt an institution which, when exogenously imposed, proves to be efficiency enhancing.

Perceptions of Teachers on the Ban of Corporal Punishment in Pre-Primary Institutions in Kenya

The purpose of the study was to investigate perceptions of teachers on the ban of corporal punishment in pre-primaryinstitutions. The objectives of the study were to investigate teachers’ attitudes towards corporal punishment ban inpre-schools and to establish whether the level of education of teachers had an influence on the use of corporalpunishment. A descriptive survey design was used. Stratified sampling was used to select the pre-schools; simplerandom sampling was applied to select all the teachers in the pre-schools. Data was collected through questionnairesand analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Major findings indicated that: 71% agreed thatreasonable corporal punishment is beneficial to the pre-school learners; 80% of the pre-school teachers used corporalpunishment to maintain order in the classroom; Teachers perceived negatively the outlawing of corporal punishment;the level of teachers’ education had no influence on the use of corporal punishment. The instances when corporalpunishment was used by teachers were non-academic. The results form a basis of re-thinking the initial teacherstraining curriculum and subsequent in-service training in regard to classroom disruptions and how best they could behandled. As changes occur in educational setting, courses for training of teachers in the initial course, inductioncourse or later in-service courses must reflect such changes and support and develop relevant skills in the staff uponwhom these changes will impinge. The teacher trainee ought to be exposed to other methods of behaviourmodification and these methods should have their own content and well researched.

合作演化中的反馈机制

Explaining cooperative behaviors in biological and social systems is a fundamental and challenging problem. Evolutionary game theory provides a powerful framework addressing this issue. Costly punishment is proven to be a promising mechanism promoting cooperation by many experimental designs in the field of evolutionary game theory. We first give an introduction to cooperation and evolutionary games, and then review experimental and theoretical works on punishment, focusing on the evolution of punishment, its positive and detrimental effects on cooperation evolving. We further explore the dynamical influence induced by punishment evasion, and the effect of institutional punishment and reward on cooperation. Finally we summarize our conclusions and briefly outline directions for future research.

Optimal distribution of incentives for public cooperation in heterogeneous interaction environments.

In the framework of evolutionary games with institutional reciprocity, limited incentives are at disposal for rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors. In the simplest case, it can be assumed that, depending on their strategies, all players receive equal incentives from the common pool. The question arises, however, what is the optimal distribution of institutional incentives? How should we best reward and punish individuals for cooperation to thrive? We study this problem for the public goods game on a scale-free network. We show that if the synergetic effects of group interactions are weak, the level of cooperation in the population can be maximized simply by adopting the simplest “equal distribution” scheme. If synergetic effects are strong, however, it is best to reward high-degree nodes more than low-degree nodes. These distribution schemes for institutional rewards are independent of payoff normalization. For institutional punishment, however, the same optimization problem is more complex, and its solution depends on whether absolute or degree-normalized payoffs are used. We find that degree-normalized payoffs require high-degree nodes be punished more lenient than low-degree nodes. Conversely, if absolute payoffs count, then high-degree nodes should be punished stronger than low-degree nodes.

Sanctions as honest signals – The evolution of pool punishment by public sanctioning institutions

In many species, mutual cooperation is stabilized by forms of policing and peer punishment: if cheaters are punished, there is a strong selective pressure to cooperate. Most human societies have complemented, and sometimes even replaced, such peer punishment mechanisms with pool punishment, where punishment is outsourced to central institutions such as the police. Even before free-riding occurs, such institutions require investments, which could serve as costly signals. Here, we show with a game theoretical model that this signaling effect in turn can be crucial for the evolution of punishment institutions: In the absence of such signals, pool punishment is only stable with second-order punishment and can only evolve when individuals have the freedom not to take part in any interaction. With such signals, individuals can opportunistically adjust their behavior, which promotes the evolution of stable pool punishment even in situations where no one can stand aside. Thus, the human propensity to react opportunistically to credible punishment threats is often sufficient to establish stable punishment institutions and to maintain high levels of cooperation.

Should Law Keep Pace with Society?

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the ability to control how quickly legal rules of punishment evolve relative to social behavior that legal punishment regulates. But at what rate should legal rules evolve relative to society to maximize compliance? We investigate this question by modeling the co-evolution of law and cooperation in a public goods game with centralized punishment. We vary the rate at which the State updates the legal punishment strategy relative to Citizens' updating of their contribution strategy, and observe the effect on Citizen cooperation. When States have unlimited resources, slower State leads to more Citizen cooperation: by updating more slowly, States forces Citizens to adapt to the legal punishment rules. When States depend on Citizens to finance their punishment activities, however, we find evidence of a Goldilocks'' effect: the optimal outcome is achieved when legal rules evolve at a critical evolutionary rate that is slow enough to allow citizens to adapt, but fast enough to enable states to quickly respond to outbreaks of citizen lawlessness.

Sustaining cooperation in social dilemmas: Comparison of centralized punishment institutions

This study investigates two centralized punishment institutions for a linear public goods game. These institutions require a certain contribution level and sanction under-contributing players. The two differ in who, among those who do not meet this requirement, receive sanctions. In one institution, all violators are sanctioned, and in the other, only the worst violator(s) is sanctioned. Theoretically, the public goods game of the latter institution yields contributions equal to or greater than that of the former institution with the same requirement and sanction level. The results of an experiment support this theoretical prediction. However, there is a discrepancy between the theory and laboratory observations in that the institution with the theoretically optimal requirement did not yield the highest profit.

Rewards and the evolution of cooperation in public good games

Properly coordinating cooperation is relevant for resolving public good problems, such as clean energy and environmental protection. However, little is known about how individuals can coordinate themselves for a certain level of cooperation in large populations of strangers. In a typical situation, a consensus-building process rarely succeeds, owing to a lack of face and standing. The evolution of cooperation in this type of situation is studied here using threshold public good games, in which cooperation prevails when it is initially sufficient, or otherwise it perishes. While punishment is a powerful tool for shaping human behaviours, institutional punishment is often too costly to start with only a few contributors, which is another coordination problem. Here, we show that whatever the initial conditions, reward funds based on voluntary contribution can evolve. The voluntary reward paves the way for effectively overcoming the coordination problem and efficiently transforms freeloaders into cooperators with a perceived small risk of collective failure.

Thinking about Punishment across Space and Time

This short essay shows why the customary two-categories of punishment theories (retributive theories and consequentialist theories) should be increased to three to include a-normative theory and how that would aid understanding of differences in punishment thinking and policy over time and across space. Section I lays out conventional typologies of punishment theories and explains why a-normative theory should be added. Section II introduces the general literature on determinants of punishment policies and practices. Section III briefly discusses Eastern and Central Europe. Section IV illustrates how the normative and explanatory theories when combined enrich explanations and improve understanding.Keywords: punishment theories; punishment policies and practices; history of punishment institutions and practices; comparative analysis of punishment institutions and practices; Eastern and Central Europe

Justification and Legitimate Punishment

Punishment can lose its legitimacy if the enforcer can profit from delivering punishment. We use a controlled laboratory experiment to examine how justification can combat profit-seeking punishment and promote the legitimacy of punishment. In a one-shot sender-receiver game, an independent third party can punish the sender upon seeing whether the sender has told the truth. Most third parties punish the senders regardless of how the senders behave when they can profit from punishment. However, majority third parties punish the sender if and only if the sender lies when they have to provide explanations for their punishment decisions. Our data also suggests that senders are more likely to perceive punishment as legitimate and behave honestly when they know the enforcer has to justify their punishment decisions. Our findings suggest that justification requirement plays an important role in building efficient punishment institutions.

Fairness and Reciprocity in Contract Governance

Contract Governance is, amongst others, concerned with solving problems of cooperation and opportunistic behaviour. However, with homo reciprocans as a party to the contract, contractual relationships are necessarily accompanied by expectations of fairness and reciprocity. In this regard, the last two decades have witnessed tremendous progress towards a behavioural account of fairness and its pivotal role in sustaining cooperation. In this article, I sketch some important features of the general working mechanisms of fairness based on a selective review of the literature. It is crucial to distinguish mental, behavioural and social aspects of fairness and to see how these work together. Experimental game theory has focused mainly on the behavioural level and developed two types of models of preferences for fairness: inequity aversion, concerned with the distribution of outcomes, and reciprocity, concerned with the fairness of intentions. Both assume preferences for fairness to interact with selfish preferences that remain a primary motivational force. On the mental level, however, fairness judgments also allow for several proportional criteria of distribution, as Equity Theory in social psychology has shown. The (psychological) necessity to select among different criteria of fairness and their operationalization renders fairness judgments indeterminate and makes them receptive for social and contextual influences. Because of this, homo reciprocans is a rather impressionable being and his behaviour heavily depends on the specifics of the situation and the social context in which he is acting. Compared to homo oeconomicus, cooperation is both easier and more difficult with homo reciprocans. It is easier because reciprocity repays cooperation with cooperation. It is more difficult because opportunistic behaviour by selfish types, usually mixed into real-life populations, triggers negative reciprocity on the side of reciprocal actors causing a downward spiral that eventually extinguishes cooperation. Furthermore, even fairness judgments are unconsciously biased toward self-interest if and insofar as factual knowledge or normative standards are ambiguous. Sanctions therefore remain crucial to sustain cooperation, but they assume quite a different objective compared to homo oeconomicus. With homo reciprocans, sanctions have to provide social or moral incentives in order to sustain positive reciprocity, and they do so indirectly by preventing opportunism and thus keeping social relations fair or balanced. Negative reciprocity provides sufficient motivation to leave punishment to the parties, but excess punishment and anti-cooperative punishment, combined with self-serving perceptions, call for institutional intervention in order to prevent a vicious circle. Although people in general show an aversion against punishment institutions, they are accepted as legitimate if they are chosen autonomously. Furthermore, because of the indeterminacy of fairness, there is a need to settle on shared fairness standards, if cooperation is to be based on positive reciprocity and protected against negative reciprocity. This creates a higher-order coordination problem, which institutions can help to solve, because fairness judgments intrinsically rely on reference points that institutions can provide. In Contract Governance, both statutes and contracts can serve this purpose through their expressive effect. Also, the mere fact of making a promise and the 'procedure' of doing so with reference to the law induces a commitment to the contract. In short, Contract Governance has to tame and institutionalise sanctions and it has to coordinate fairness standards via the expressive dimension of norms and contracts.

Cooperation under Punishment: Imperfect Information Destroys it and Centralizing Punishment Does Not Help

We run several experiments which allow us to compare cooperation under perfect and imperfect information and under a centralized and decentralized punishment regime. We find that (1) centralization by itself does not improve cooperation and welfare compared to an informal, peer-to-peer punishment regime and (2) centralized punishment is equally sensitive to noise as decentralized punishment, that is, it leads to significantly lower cooperation and welfare (total profits). Our results shed critical light on the widespread conjecture that the centralization of punishment institutions is welfare increasing in itself.

Fairness and Reciprocity in Contract Governance

Contract Governance is, amongst others, concerned with solving problems of cooperation and opportunistic behaviour. However, with homo reciprocans as a party to the contract, contractual relationships are necessarily accompanied by expectations of fairness and reciprocity. In this regard, the last two decades have witnessed tremendous progress towards a behavioural account of fairness and its pivotal role in sustaining cooperation. In this article, I sketch some important features of the general working mechanisms of fairness based on a selective review of the literature. It is crucial to distinguish mental, behavioural and social aspects of fairness and to see how these work together. Experimental game theory has focused mainly on the behavioural level and developed two types of models of preferences for fairness: inequity aversion, concerned with the distribution of outcomes, and reciprocity, concerned with the fairness of intentions. Both assume preferences for fairness to interact with selfish preferences that remain a primary motivational force. On the mental level, however, fairness judgments also allow for several proportional criteria of distribution, as Equity Theory in social psychology has shown. The (psychological) necessity to select among different criteria of fairness and their operationalization renders fairness judgments indeterminate and makes them receptive for social and contextual influences. Because of this, homo reciprocans is a rather impressionable being and his behaviour heavily depends on the specifics of the situation and the social context in which he is acting. Compared to homo oeconomicus, cooperation is both easier and more difficult with homo reciprocans. It is easier because reciprocity repays cooperation with cooperation. It is more difficult because opportunistic behaviour by selfish types, usually mixed into real-life populations, triggers negative reciprocity on the side of reciprocal actors causing a downward spiral that eventually extinguishes cooperation. Furthermore, even fairness judgments are unconsciously biased toward self-interest if and insofar as factual knowledge or normative standards are ambiguous. Sanctions therefore remain crucial to sustain cooperation, but they assume quite a different objective compared to homo oeconomicus. With homo reciprocans, sanctions have to provide social or moral incentives in order to sustain positive reciprocity, and they do so indirectly by preventing opportunism and thus keeping social relations fair or balanced. Negative reciprocity provides sufficient motivation to leave punishment to the parties, but excess punishment and anti-cooperative punishment, combined with self-serving perceptions, call for institutional intervention in order to prevent a vicious circle. Although people in general show an aversion against punishment institutions, they are accepted as legitimate if they are chosen autonomously. Furthermore, because of the indeterminacy of fairness, there is a need to settle on shared fairness standards, if cooperation is to be based on positive reciprocity and protected against negative reciprocity. This creates a higher-order coordination problem, which institutions can help to solve, because fairness judgments intrinsically rely on reference points that institutions can provide. In Contract Governance, both statutes and contracts can serve this purpose through their expressive effect. Also, the mere fact of making a promise and the 'procedure' of doing so with reference to the law induces a commitment to the contract. In short, Contract Governance has to tame and institutionalise sanctions and it has to coordinate fairness standards via the expressive dimension of norms and contracts.