Punishment Cannot Sustain Cooperation in a Public Good Game with Free-Rider Anonymity

Amrish Patel, Edward Cartwright and Van Vugt Mark ()
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Van Vugt Mark: Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Postal: 1081 BT Amsterdam,, The Netherlands.

No 451, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Individuals often have legitimate but publicly unobservable reasons for not partaking in cooperative social endeavours. This means others who lack legitimate reasons may then have the opportunity to behave uncooperatively, i.e. free-ride, and be indistinguishable from those with legitimate reasons. Free-riders have a degree of anonymity. In the context of a public good game we consider the e¤ect of free-rider anonymity on the ability of voluntary punishment to sustain cooperative social norms. Despite only inducing a weak form of free-rider anonymity, punishment falls and cannot sustain cooperation.

Keywords: Anonymity; free-riding; public goods experiment; punishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D82 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2010-05-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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