Social learning increases the acceptance and the efficiency of punishment institutions in social dilemmas

Özgür Gürerk

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Endogenously chosen punishment institutions perform well in increasing contributions and long-term payoffs in social dilemma situations. However, they suffer from (a) initial reluctance of subjects to join the punishment institution and (b) initial efficiency losses due to frequent punishment. Here, we investigate the effects of social learning on the acceptence and the efficiency of a peer punishment institution in a community choice experiment. Subjects choose between communities with and without the possibility to punish peers before interacting in a repeated social dilemma situation. We find that providing participants with a social history - presenting the main results of an identical previous experiment conducted with dierent subjects - decreases the initial reluctance towards the punishment institution signicantly. Moreover, with social history, cooperative groups reach the social optimum more rapidly and there is lower efficiency loss due to reduced punishment. Our findings shed light on the importance of social learning for the acceptance of seemingly unpopular but socially desirable mechanisms.

Keywords: Social dilemmas; Social history; Social learning; Community choice; Punishment; Institution choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27357/1/MPRA_paper_27357.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/42971/1/MPRA_paper_42971.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/45925/8/MPRA_paper_45925.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social learning increases the acceptance and the efficiency of punishment institutions in social dilemmas (2013)
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:pra:mprapa:27357

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().