Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments
TLDR
In this paper, the authors provide evidence that free riders are heavily punished even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher, and they also show that free riding causes strong negative emotions among cooperators.Abstract:
This paper provides evidence that free riders are heavily punished even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher. The more free riders negatively deviate from the group standard the more they are punished. As a consequence, the existence of an opportunity for costly punishment causes a large increase in cooperation levels because potential free riders face a credible threat. We show, in particular, that in the presence of a costly punishment opportunity almost complete cooperation can be achieved and maintained although, under the standard assumptions of rationality and selfishness, there should be no cooperation at all. We also show that free riding causes strong negative emotions among cooperators. The intensity of these emotions is the stronger the more the free riders deviate from the group standard. Our results provide, therefore, support for the hypothesis that emotions are guarantors of credible threats.read more
Citations
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A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation
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A theory of fairness, competition and cooperation
Ernst Fehr,Klaus M. Schmidt +1 more
TL;DR: This paper showed that if some people care about equity, the puzzles can be resolved and that the economic environment determines whether the fair types or the selesh types dominate equilibrium behavior in cooperative games.
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A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation
TL;DR: This article showed that if a fraction of the people exhibit inequality aversion, stable cooperation is maintained although punishment is costly for those who punish, and they also showed that when they are given the opportunity to punish free riders, stable cooperations are maintained.
Journal ArticleDOI
Impure altruism and donations to public goods: a theory of warm-glow giving*
TL;DR: In this paper, the invariance proposition of public goods and the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving are discussed. And the authors show that impure altruism is more consistent with observed patterns of giving than the conventional pure altruism approach, and has policy implications that may differ widely from those of the conventional models.
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Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History
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