Cooperation and norm enforcement - The individual-level perspective

Abstract

We explore the relationship between individuals' disposition to cooperate and their inclination to engage in peer punishment as well as their relative importance for mitigating social dilemmas. Using a modified strategy-method approach we identify individual punishment patterns and link them with individual cooperation patterns. Classifying N = 628 subjects along these two dimensions documents that cooperation and punishment patterns are aligned for most individuals. However, the data also reveal a sizable share of free-riders that punish pro-socially and conditional cooperators that do not engage in punishment. Analyzing the interplay between types in an additional experiment, we show that pro-social punishers are important for achieving cooperation. Incorporating information on punishment types explains large amounts of the between-and within-group variation in cooperation.

Peer-Punishment in a Cooperation and a Coordination Game

“…Differences in peer-punishment inclinations have been shown to have important economic implications, as group compositions (with respect to punishment types) significantly affect group outcomes in public goods games [15]. We show that the same could potentially apply to coordination games, too, since our results depict a large degree of heterogeneity in individual inclinations to apply costly sanctions in the coordination environment as well.…”

“…Our findings contribute to the recent literature that advances the strategy-method design to allow for the elicitation of individual level peer-punishment behavior in social dilemmas [15,25,26]. Differences in peer-punishment inclinations have been shown to have important economic implications, as group compositions (with respect to punishment types) significantly affect group outcomes in public goods games [15].…”

“…Reputation (e.g., [9]), trust (e.g., [10]), pre-play communication (cheap talk) (e.g., [11]), or mutual monitoring (e.g., [12]) are such effective countermeasures, improving cooperation levels in the lab and in the field. Similarly, the availability of sanctions via peer-punishment (e.g., [3,[13][14][15]) or as a centralized system (e.g., [16][17][18]) can lead to improvements in cooperation, resulting in higher provision of public goods.…”

“…Moreover, behavior in the cooperation and the punishment domain seem to be only very weakly linked. Knowing about the existence of punishment phenotypes in social dilemmas [15,25,26], the consistency across games where cooperation interests are at play [24], and having observed the potential efficacy of peer-punishment in coordination problems, we investigate whether punishment phenotypes transmit to domains where selfish players might also be interested in using costly peer punishment. Thus, instead of looking at norm-enforcement within different cooperation environments, we analyze behavioral differences in norm-enforcement by varying the type of the underlying environment between games.…”

“…We do so by using an approach that entails a fine-grained elicitation of punishment decision and relies on the strategy method technology [4,27]. This allow us to classify punishment types in the spirit of Albrecht et al [15] for each individual in each game separately and, consequently, to examine the robustness of punishment phenotypes (henceforth "types") across the two settings.…”