Altruistic Norm Enforcement and Decision-Making Format in a Dilemma: Experimental Evidence

Kenju Kamei

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Past research has shown that people often take punitive actions towards norm violators even when they are not directly involved in transactions. However, it at the same time suggests that such third-party punishment may not be strong enough to enforce cooperation norms in dilemma situations. This paper experimentally compares the effectiveness of third-party punishment between different enforcement formats. Consistent with past studies, our data shows that having an individual third-party punisher in a group does not make one’s defection materially unbeneficial because of the weak punishment intensity. It also shows that third-party punishment is not effective when two individuals form a pair as a punisher and jointly decide how strong third-party punishment they impose. However, third-party punishment can be sufficiently strong to enforce cooperation norms when a third-party punisher’s action choice is made known to another individual third-party punisher in a different group, or when there are two independent individual third-party players in a group.

Keywords: experiment; cooperation; dilemma; third-party punishment; social norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D79 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-02-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-law and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:76641

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