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When is punishment harmful to cooperation? A note on antisocial and perverse punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Tingting Fu  and
Louis Putterman Open the ORCID record for Louis Putterman [Opens in a new window]
Tingting Fu
Affiliation:
Nankai University, 94 Weijin Road, Tianjin 300071, China
Louis Putterman*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Brown University, 64 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA
*
e-mail: Louis_putterman@brown.edu
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Abstract

Economists conducting laboratory experiments on cooperation and peer punishment find that a non-negligible minority of punishments is directed at cooperators rather than free riders. Such punishments have been categorized as ‘perverse’ or ‘antisocial,’ using definitions that partially overlap, but not entirely so. Which approach better identifies punishment that discourages cooperation? We analyze the data from 16 sites studied by Herrmann et al. (Science 319(5868):1362–1367, 2008) and find that when subjects are uninformed about who punished them, the recipient’s contribution relative to the group average (whether it is ‘perverse’) is a better predictor of negative impact on contribution than is her contribution relative to the punisher’s (whether it is ‘antisocial’). Regression estimates nevertheless suggest that punished subjects attempt to take relative contribution of punisher into account even if only by conjecture.

Keywords

PunishmentCooperationExperimentAntisocial punishmentPerverse punishment

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C9: Design of Experiments
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 151 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0053-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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