Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments

TLDR

Casual evidence and everyday experience show that people strongly dislike being the “sucker” in social dilemmas, motivating cooperators to punish free‑riders even at personal cost and without future benefits. The study experimentally demonstrates that cooperators are broadly willing to punish free‑riders and tests whether such punishment reduces free‑riding. The results confirm that costly, benefit‑free punishment is common, that harsher punishment targets greater deviations from cooperation, and that free‑riders can lessen punishment by increasing cooperation, suggesting punishment opportunities curb free‑riding.

Abstract

Casual evidence as well as daily experience suggest that many people have a strong aversion against being the 'sucker' in social dilemma situations. As a consequence, those who cooperate may be willing to punish free-riding, even if this is costly for them and even if they cannot expect future benefits from their punishment activities. A main purpose of this paper is to show experimentally that there is indeed a widespread willingness of the cooperators to punish the free-riders. Our results indicate that this holds true even if punishment is costly and does not provide any material benefits for the punisher. In addition, we provide evidence that free-riders are punished the more heavily the more they deviate from the cooperation levels of the cooperators. Potential free-riders, therefore, can avoid or at least reduce punishment by increasing their cooperation levels. This, in turn, suggests that in the presence of punishment opportunities there will be less free riding. Testing this conjecture is the other major aim of our paper.