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Who punishes? A note on responses to cooperation and defection across cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Talbot M. Andrews Open the ORCID record for Talbot M. Andrews [Opens in a new window]
Talbot M. Andrews*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1024, Storrs, CT 06269-1024, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

While people are surprisingly cooperative in social dilemmas, cooperation is fragile to the emergence of defection. Punishment is a key mechanism through which people sustain cooperation, but when are people willing to pay the costs to punish? Using data from existing work on punishment in public goods games conducted in industrialized countries throughout the world (Herrmann et al. in Science, 319(5868):1362–1367, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144237), I find first that those who contribute more are consistently punished less. Second, in many study locations, there are insignificant differences in the propensity of those who contribute and defect to punish. Finally, those who contribute and defect both carry out punishment against defectors. Some defectors do punish cooperators, but less often than they punish other defectors. The determinants of punishment are largely consistent across cities.

Keywords

Public goodsCooperationPunishment

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D90: General‡ C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior
Type
Replication Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 10 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Behavioral and Experimental Economics for Innovative Policy-Making (Articles 1 to 3) , December 2024 , pp. 603 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Economic Science Association 2024.

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