Driving Forces Behind Informal Sanctions

By Armin Falk, Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher. Social Science Research Network, 2005

472 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a considerable amount of spiteful punishment on the cooperators. However, spiteful punishment vanishes if the punishers can no longer affect the payoff differences between themselves and the punished individual, whereas the cooperators even increase the resources devoted to punishment in this case. Our data also discriminate between different fairness principles. Fairness theories that are based on the assumption that players compare their own payoff to the group's average or the group's total payoff cannot explain the fact that cooperators target their punishment at the defectors. Fairness theories assuming that players aim to minimize payoff inequalities cannot explain the fact that cooperators punish defectors even if payoff inequalities cannot be reduced. Therefore, retaliation, i.e., the desire to harm those who committed unfair acts, seems to be the most important motive behind fairness-driven informal sanctions.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f10130e6c4d88545a2f9c7c640f5d1e2be6fdd1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Social learning and voluntary cooperation among like-minded people (2005, background): “However, an equally frequent observation is that cooperation declines to rather low levels in repeatedly played cooperation games (Ledyard 1995).”
The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia (2011, background): “See for instance Fehr and Gächter (2000), Fehr and Gächter (2002); Masclet, et al. (2003); Egas and Riedl (2008); Noussair and Tucker (2005); Page, et al.”
Homo Reciprocans: Survey Evidence on Behavioural Outcomes (2008, background): “It is also predicted based on laboratory evidence, which shows that willingness to reciprocate decreases in the costs of doing so (Quervaine et al., 2004; Falk et al., 2005).”
SIMULTANEOUS DECISION‐MAKING IN COMPETITIVE AND COOPERATIVE ENVIRONMENTS (2013, unknown): “Two common explanations for non-zero contributions to public goods are based on bounded rationality or mistakes (Andreoni, 1995; Anderson et al., 1998) and social preferences (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999; Fischbacher et al., 2001; Falk et al., 2005).”
The Relationship between Economic Preferences and Psychological Personality Measures (2012, methodology): “13The design of the experiment was adapted from Falk et al. (2005) 11 method.”
The Development of Egalitarianism, Altruism, Spite and Parochialism in Childhood and Adolescence (2013, unknown): “The incidence of spiteful behavior among the oldest adolescents in our study is fairly similar to that observed in adults (Falk et al., 2005; Herrmann et al., 2008), indicating that the significant changes in the prevalence of spite occur in adolescence and have been captured in our study. With resp”
Voting on Punishment Systems Within a Heterogeneous Group (2011, background): “…to another is influenced by the difference in contribution between the punishing and the punished agent, as well as the difference between the negative deviations of the recipient’s contribution from the group average level (Fehr and Gächter, 2000; Masclet et al., 2003; and Falk et al., 2005).”
Parental background and other-regarding preferences in children (2014, background): “A positive spectrum of other-regarding preferences—altruism, inequality aversion, and efficiency concerns—helps to establish and maintain cooperative and fair group outcomes even in situations with a limited scope for reputation-building (Bowles 2006; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003), while spitefulness l”
Social ties and coordination on negative reciprocity: The role of affect (2008, background): “This is why we observe punishment even in situations where it has no effect on income differences (Falk et al., 2005).”
A comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments (2008, unknown): “Finally, we observe considerable amounts of punishment in treatment 1 although punishments in that treatment can not reduce income di¤erences between participants (a point which has also been made in Falk et al., 2005; Sefton et al., 2005; Anderson and Putterman, 2006; Masclet and Villeval, 2006).”
Evolutionary Establishment of Moral and Double Moral Standards through Spatial Interactions (2010, unknown): “Their existence has even been found in experiments [34,35].”
Cooperation in primates and humans : mechanisms and evolution (2006, background): “…(see for example , Bowles et al. 2001, Sefton et al. 2002, Gächter et al. 2003, Masclet et al. 2003, Carpenter 2004, Carpenter et al. 2004, Falk et al. 2004, Gürerk et al. 2004, Anderson & Putterman, in prep., Bochet et al., in prep., Page et al. in prep., Carpenter in prep., Noussair &…”
Spite and Development (2008, background): “Institute for Empirical Research in Economics University of Zurich Bluemlisalpstrasse 10 CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland, email: efehr@iew.uzh.ch”