Resentment and Punishment

Punishment is understood to be necessary to the creation and maintenance of social norms. We argue that it can be driven by resentment that arises when norms are violated. Using a model of endogenous norms, we show how to define a norm-violation on any game or choice set and how to predict which actions will generate resentment and thus be the target of punishment. We analyze evidence from previous experiments and show that our model of resentment-driven punishment can explain observed second- and third-party punishment decisions across diverse settings