Punishment, counterpunishment and sanction enforcement in a social dilemma experiment

By Laurent Denant-Boèmont, David Masclet, Charles N. Noussair. 2007

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the results of an experiment that explores the sanctioning behavior of individuals who experience a social dilemma. In the game we study, players choose contribution levels to a public good and subsequently have multiple opportunities to reduce the earnings of the other members of the group. The treatments vary in terms of individuals’ opportunities to (a) avenge sanctions that have been directed toward themselves, and (b) punish others’ sanctioning behavior with respect to third parties. We find that individuals do avenge sanctions they have received, and this serves to decrease contribution levels. They also punish those who fail to sanction third parties, but the resulting increase in contributions is smaller than the decrease the avenging of sanctions induces. When there are five rounds of unrestricted sanctioning, contributions and welfare are significantly lower than when only one round of sanctioning opportunities exists, and welfare is lower than at a benchmark of zero cooperation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8a34b196c5ee8dcad63ee506cad6b8879b883ff

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Citations in the corpus

Voting on Punishment Systems Within a Heterogeneous Group (2011, background): “The first is that, as soon as counterpunishment is allowed, some of the beneficial effect is negated (Denant-Boemont et al., 2007; Nikiforakis, 2008).”
Norm Enforcement in the City: A Natural Field Experiment (2012, background): “3 Allowing for these forces is known to limit the use of costly punishment (Denant-Boemont et al., 2007; Nikiforakis, 2008; Nikiforakis and Engelmann, 2011; Xiao and Houser, 2005).”
Normative conflict and feuds: The limits of self-enforcement (2012, background): “This disagreement may increase the likelihood that punishment is viewed as inappropriate and that the punishment triggers counter-punishment (Denant-Boemont et al. 2007; Nikiforakis, 2008).”
Exploring Cyberbullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games (2015, background): “Similarly, after the match is completed, a negative outcome and counterfactual thinking might lead bullied players to seek revenge on toxic players as a defensive reaction to perceived victimization and a method by which to gain some emotional satisfaction [20].”
Punishment and counter-punishment in public good games: Can we really govern ourselves? (2008, positive): “Denant-Boemont et al. (2007) is an interesting complementary study based on a similar experimental design.”
The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia (2011, methodology): “See for instance Fehr and Gächter (2000), d Riedl (2008), Noussair and Tucker (2005), Page et al. (2005), Bochet et al. (2006), Gürerk et al. (2006), ), Ones and Putterman (2007), Sefton et al.”
Enforcement of contribution norms in public good games with heterogeneous populations (2009, neutral): “Importantly, the respondents had experience reading experimental instructions but had not participated in any of our experimental sessions (described below). increase the response rate, students who completed the questionnaire had a 2% chance of receiving e 100,-.”
Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature (2011, background): “An innovative study by Denant-Boemont et al. (2007) addresses these two aspects”
Self-Organization for Collective Action: An Experimental Study of Voting on Formal, Informal, and No Sanction Regimes (2011, positive): “The results in Nikiforakis (2008) and Denant-Boemont et al. (2007) suggest that an informal sanctions regime with identifiable punishers and with counter-punishment opportunities might have a considerably more difficult time competing for votes with NS and FS alternatives.”
Second-order freeriding on antisocial punishment restores the effectiveness of prosocial punishment (2017, background): “While the punishment of freeriders is aimed at increasing cooperation, antisocial punishment can be a form of retaliation for punishment received in repeated games [32, 41], or is simply aimed at cooperators without a retaliatory motive [36, 37].”
A comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments (2008, neutral): “…(2000, 2002), Masclet et al. (2003), Carpenter (2005), Nikiforakis (2005), Noussair and Tucker (2005), Page et al. (2005), Sefton et al. (2005), Anderson and Putterman (2006), Bochet et al. (2006), Cinyabuguma et al. (2006), Gürerk et al. (2006), Carpenter (2007), Denant-Boemont et al. (2007).”