 Trigger-happy or precisionist? On demand for monitoring in peer-based public goods provisionAndreas Nicklisch, Louis Putterman and Christian Thöni Journal of Public Economics, 2021, vol. 200, issue C Abstract: Recent studies question whether societies can self-govern public goods dilemmas with the help of decentralized punishment opportunities. One important challenge is imperfect information about individuals’ contributions. In laboratory experiments, imperfect information increases misdirected punishment and thereby hampers the efficacy of the punishment mechanism. A key question is thus whether those facing such a collective action dilemma would punish despite doubt if they could observe one another’s actions more accurately at some cost. We find that most experimental subjects prefer to engage in costly monitoring before punishing, or else not to punish at all. We demonstrate a price sensitive demand for monitoring, a tendency of known monitoring to serve as a warning of punishment, a taste-based preference for full over partial monitoring, and positive effects of monitoring on cooperation and efficiency. Keywords: Public goods; Peer punishment; Costly monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:200:y:2021:i:c:s0047272721000657 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104429 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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