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What norms trigger punishment?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Jeffrey Carpenter  and
Peter Hans Matthews
Jeffrey Carpenter*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA
Peter Hans Matthews*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Many experiments have demonstrated the power of norm enforcement— peer monitoring and punishment—to maintain, or even increase, contributions in social dilemma settings, but little is known about the underlying norms that monitors use to make punishment decisions, either within or across groups. Using a large sample of experimental data, we empirically recover the set of norms used most often by monitors and show first that the decision to punish should be modeled separately from the decision of how much to punish. Second, we show that absolute norms often fit the data better than the group average norm often assumed in related work. Third, we find that different norms seem to influence the decisions about punishing violators inside and outside one's own group.

Keywords

Public goodExperimentPunishmentSocial normNorm enforcement

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 272 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2009

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Footnotes

We thank Marco Castillo, Jeremy Clark, Carolyn Craven, Herb Gintis, Corinna Noelke, Louis Putterman, David Sloan Wilson and two referees for comments on earlier versions of this work, as well as seminar participants at the European University Institute, Canadian Economics Association and Economic Science Association. The first author also thanks the NSF (CAREER 0092953) for financial support.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-009-9214-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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