) there is preference uncertainty. In a linear public good with punishment meted out by a disinterested participant, I test … two implications of the model: (a) participants increase contributions in reaction to imperfect punishment; (b) imperfect … punishment helps sustain cooperation if participants experience free-riding …

, even if punishment is costly. However, these studies focus on situations where there is no uncertainty about others …' behavior. We investigate punishment in a world with “reasonable doubt” about others' contributions. Interestingly, people … level of a setting without punishment. Our findings suggest that sufficient information accuracy about others' behavior is …

We investigate power abuse of a single punisher in a public-goods-game subject to variations in punishment power and …

The most famous element in Bentham’s theory of punishment, the Panopticon Prison, expresses his view of the two … purposes of punishment, deterrence and special prevention. This paper inves-tigates Bentham’s intuition in a public goods lab … experiment, by manipulating how much infor-mation on punishment experienced by others is available to would-be offenders …

We use a public-good experiment to analyze behavior in a decentralized asymmetric punishment institution. The … institution is asymmetric in the sense that players differ in the effectiveness of their punishment. At the aggregate level, we … observe remarkable similarities between outcomes in asymmetric and symmetric punishment institutions. Controlling for the …

This paper studies experimentally how the endogeneity of sanctioning institutions affects the severity of punishment in … when subjects can vote on the institutional setting. We find that punishment is significantly higher when the sanctioning … institution is exogenous, which can be explained by a difference in the effectiveness of punishment. Subjects respond to …

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social … punishment. Using multiple punishment stages and self-contained episodes of interaction, we disentangle the effects of … retaliation and norm-related punishment. An additional treatment provides data on the norms bystanders use in judging punishment …

symmetric and asymmetric punishment regimes for bribery, one may wonder which punishment strategy is more effective in curbing … design. The results show that, in both countries, with symmetric punishment recipients are less likely to grant the socially … undesirable favor, while bribers are more likely to report to the authorities with asymmetric punishment. In addition, when …

centralized and decentralized punishment regime. We find that (1) centralization by itself does not improve cooperation and … welfare compared to an informal, peer-to-peer punishment regime and (2) centralized punishment is equally sensitive to noise … as decentralized punishment, that is, it leads to significantly lower cooperation and welfare (total profits). Our …