The Demand for Punishment to Promote Cooperation Among Like-Minded People

Christoph Buehren () and Astrid Dannenberg ()
Additional contact information
Christoph Buehren: Clausthal University of Technology
Astrid Dannenberg: University of Kassel

MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that groups consisting of like-minded cooperators are able to cooperate irrespective of punishment and therefore have a lower demand for a costly punishment institution than groups of like-minded free riders, who are unable to cooperate without punishment. We also predict that the difference in the demand for punishment is particularly large when members know about the composition of their group. The experimental results confirm these hypotheses. However, the information about the composition of the group turns out to be even more important than we expected. It helps cooperative groups to avoid wasting resources for an unneeded punishment institution. In uncooperative groups, it helps members to recognize the need for punishment early on and not to follow an uncooperative path that produces a persistently competitive attitude. These findings highlight the role of group composition and information for institution formation and that lessons learned by one group cannot be readily transferred to other groups.

JEL-codes: C72 C91 D23 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming in

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb02/research-groups ... /44-2020_buehren.pdf First 202044 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mar:magkse:202044

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernd Hayo ().