Altruistic punishment and the threat of feuds

Altruistic punishment may promote cooperation, but can also lead to costly feuds. We examine how the threat of feuds affects individuals' willingness to engage in altruistic punishment in a public good experiment in which the number of stages is determined by participants' actions. The design imposes minimal restrictions on who can punish whom and when, and therefore allows participants to use a range of punishment strategies. We find that participants recognize the threat of feuds and respond to it by employing strategies that prevent their breakout. When feuds can span several periods, the extent of altruistic punishment is greatly reduced. This leads to progressively lower levels of cooperation and earnings relative to a baseline treatment where punishment cannot be avenged.

[1]  Nikos Nikiforakis,et al.  Punishment and Counter-punishment in Public Good Games: Can We Still Govern Ourselves? , 2005 .

[2]  M. Rabin.  Published by: American , 2022 .

[3]  F. Guala.  Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate , 2010, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[4]  W. Hamilton,et al.  The Evolution of Cooperation , 1984 .

[5]  Nikos Nikiforakis,et al.  Feuds in the Laboratory? A Social Dilemma Experiment , 2008 .

[6]  E. Fehr,et al.  Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[7]  Robert Shupp,et al.  The Effect of Rewards and Sanctions in Provision of Public Goods , 2006 .

[8]  C. Noussair,et al.  Combining Monetary and Social Sanctions to Promote Cooperation , 2005 .

[9]  Simon Gächter,et al.  Reciprocity, culture and human cooperation: previous insights and a new cross-cultural experiment , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[10]  Allen McDowell,et al.  From the Help Desk: Hurdle Models , 2003 .

[11]  Ben Greiner,et al.  The Online Recruitment System ORSEE 2.0 - A Guide for the Organization of Experiments in Economics , 2004 .

[12]  Jeffrey P. Carpenter,et al.  The Demand for Punishment , 2007 .

[13]  Christian Thöni,et al.  Social Learning and Voluntary Cooperation Among Like-Minded People , 2004 .

[14]  Gary E. Bolton,et al.  ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition , 2000 .

[15]  P. Wiessner.  Norm enforcement among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen , 2005, Human nature.

[16]  Martin Dufwenberg,et al.  A theory of sequential reciprocity , 2004, Games Econ. Behav..

[17]  E. Fehr,et al.  Altruistic punishment in humans , 2002, Nature.

[18]  R. Boyd,et al.  Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare , 2010, Science.

[19]  L. Putterman,et al.  Cooperation Under the Threat of Expulsion in a Public Goods Experiment , 2005 .

[20]  Drew Fudenberg,et al.  Unobserved punishment supports cooperation , 2010 .

[21]  L. Putterman,et al.  Communication and punishment in voluntary contribution experiments , 2006 .

[22]  Louis Putterman,et al.  Do Non-Strategic Sanctions Obey the Law of Demand? The Demand for Punishment in the Voluntary Contribution Mechanism , 2003, Games Econ. Behav..

[23]  Nikos Nikiforakis,et al.  Feedback, punishment and cooperation in public good experiments , 2010, Games Econ. Behav..

[24]  C. Noussair,et al.  Monetary and Non-Monetary Punishment in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism , 2003 .

[25]  T. Yamagishi.  The provision of a sanctioning system as a public good , 1986 .

[26]  U. Fischbacher.  z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments , 1999 .

[27]  E. Ostrom,et al.  Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible , 1992, American Political Science Review.

[28]  Nikos Nikiforakis,et al.  A comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments , 2008 .

[29]  Jeffrey Paul Carpenter,et al.  Punishing Free-Riders: How Group Size Affects Mutual Monitoring and the Provision of Public Goods , 2004, Games Econ. Behav..

[30]  K. Björkqvist,et al.  Aggression among university employees , 1994 .

[31]  S. Gächter,et al.  The Long-Run Benefits of Punishment , 2008, Science.

[32]  L. Putterman,et al.  Voluntary Association in Public Goods Experiments: Reciprocity, Mimicry and Efficiency , 2005 .

[33]  David Masclet,et al.  Punishment, counterpunishment and sanction enforcement in a social dilemma experiment , 2007 .

[34]  Christine M. Pearson,et al.  Tit for Tat? The Spiraling Effect of Incivility in the Workplace , 1999 .

[35]  Helen Frank Bensimon.  Violence in the Workplace , 1994 .