Punishment and Cooperation in Stochastic Social Dilemmas

Erte Xiao and Howard Kunreuther

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2016, vol. 60, issue 4, 670-693

Abstract: Previous findings on punishment have focused on deterministic environments in which the outcomes are known with certainty. In this article, we conduct experiments to investigate how punishment affects cooperation in stochastic social dilemmas where each person can decide whether to cooperate, when the outcomes of alternative strategies are specified probabilistically. Two types of punishment mechanisms are studied: (1) an unrestricted punishment mechanism—both persons can punish—and (2) a restricted punishment mechanism—only cooperators can punish noncooperators. We compare behavior in a two-person deterministic prisoner’s dilemma game (DPD) with a two-person stochastic prisoner’s dilemma (SPD). In all treatments, participants are given information on the other person’s actions. We find that in both games, the restricted punishment mechanism promotes more cooperative behavior than unrestricted punishment. However, the difference in the degree of effectiveness between the two mechanisms is smaller in the SPD game than in the DPD game because noncooperative behavior is less likely to be punished when there is outcome uncertainty. Our findings provide useful information for designing efficient incentive mechanisms to induce cooperation in a stochastic social dilemma environment.

Keywords: social dilemmas; uncertainty; punishment; cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002714564426 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Punishment and Cooperation in Stochastic Social Dilemmas (2012)
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:sae:jocore:v:60:y:2016:i:4:p:670-693

DOI: 10.1177/0022002714564426

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().