Third-Party Punishment: Retribution or Deterrence?

Fangfang Tan and Erte Xiao

Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance

Abstract: We conduct an experiment to examine the role of retribution and deterrence in motivating third party punishment. In particular, we consider how the role of these two motives may differ according to whether a third party is a group or an individual. In a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game with third party punishment, we find groups punish more when the penalty embeds deterrence than when it can only be retributive. In contrast, individual third parties’ punishment decisions do not vary on whether the punishment has any deterrent effect. In general, third party groups are less likely to impose punishment than individuals even though the punishment is costless for third parties.

Keywords: third-party punishment; group decision making; retribution; deterrence; social dilemmas; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D63 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tax.mpg.de/RePEc/mpi/wpaper/TAX-MPG-RPS-2014-05.pdf Full text (original version) (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Third-Party Punishment: Retribution or Deterrence? (2019)
Journal Article: Third-party punishment: Retribution or deterrence? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpi:wpaper:tax-mpg-rps-2014-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hans Mueller ().