The Envious Punisher: Understanding Third and Second Party Punishment with Simple Games

Andreas Leibbrandt () and Raúl López-Pérez

No iewwp373, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - IEW

Abstract: We provide a systematic comparison of punishment from unaffected third parties and affected second parties using a within-subject design in ten simple games. We apply the classification analysis by El-Gamal and Grether (1995) and find that a parsimonious model assuming subjects are either envious or selfish best explains the punishment from both third and second parties. Third and second parties punish richer co-players, even if they chose a socially or Pareto-efficient allocation or if they are merely bystanders who made no choice. Despite their unaffected position, we do not find that third parties punish in a more impartial or normative manner.

Keywords: Envy; fairness; inequity aversion; norms; punishment; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C91 D63 D74 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
Date: 2008-05

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp373.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:iewwpx:373

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - IEW
Series data maintained by Hanna Britt ().