Information-sensitive Leviathans

Andreas Nicklisch, Kristoffel Grechenig and Christian Thoeni ()
Additional contact information
Andreas Nicklisch: University of Hamburg and German Research Foundation
Kristoffel Grechenig: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Christian Thoeni: Univesity of Lausanne
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christian Thöni

No 2016-12, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: We study information conditions under which individuals are willing to delegate their sanctioning power to a central authority. We design a public goods game in which players can move between institutional environments, and we vary the observability of others' contributions. We find that the relative popularity of centralized sanctioning crucially depends on the interaction between the observability of the cooperation of others and the absence of punishment targeted at cooperative individuals. While central institutions do not outperform decentralized sanctions under perfect information, large parts of the population are attracted by central institutions that rarely punish cooperative individuals in environments with limited observability.

Keywords: centralized sanctions; cooperation; experiment; endogenous institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-sog
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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Journal Article: Information-sensitive Leviathans (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notcdx:2016-12

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