Effective Punishment Needs Legitimacy.

• Autores: Xiaoting Zheng, Puyan Nie
• Localización: Economic record, ISSN 0013-0249, Vol. 89, Nº. 287, 2013, págs. 522-544
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Perverse punishment may hinder cooperation. Perverse punishment includes retaliation punishment and non-retaliation punishment, hereafter other perverse punishment. We design two treatments of contributing to a public good: anonymous punishment ( AP) and public punisher ID to the punishee ( PPID) treatments. Retaliation is possible in PPID, but not in AP. PPID does generate more retaliation punishments. We also find that contributions in PPID are relatively stable across different group sizes, while voluntary contributions mechanism ( VCM) and AP are more sensitive to changes in group size. We explain the effectiveness of the punishment scheme by the legitimacy of a punishment. In PPID, the possibility of retaliation makes a subject deliberate more on the legitimacy of a punishment when he/she is contemplating imposing one, which leads to less perverse punishment and a higher level of cooperation in our experiment. This effect is more prominent in larger groups when targeting the punisher becomes harder without knowing the punisher's ID in AP. In particular, while the effect of whether a subject is punished on the increment of contribution is not statistically significant, the number of punishers does increase the amount of contribution significantly.