The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia

Simon Gaechter () and Benedikt Herrmann ()
Additional contact information
Simon Gaechter: University of Nottingham
Benedikt Herrmann: University of Nottingham
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Gächter

No 2010-05, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we conducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge urban-rural gap. In contrast to previous experiments we find no cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. An important reason is that there is punishment of contributors in all four subject pools. Thus, punishment can also undermine the scope for self-governance in the sense of high levels of voluntary cooperation that are sustained by sanctioning free riders only.

Keywords: social norms; free riding; misdirected punishment; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/documents/papers/2010-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia (2011)
Working Paper: The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia (2007)
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:not:notcdx:2010-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jose V Guinot Saporta ().