This paper investigates how punishment promotes cooperation when the punishment enforcer is a third party independent of the implicated parties who propose the punishment. In a prisoner's dilemma experiment, we find an independent third party vetoes not only punishment to the cooperators but...

This paper examines the deterrence effect of two auditing rules via a laboratory experiment. A traditional rule which is usually assumed in the auditing literature, audits a taxpayer with a constant probability, which is independent of others' tax returns. A bounded rule recently proposed and...

Punishment can lose its legitimacy if the enforcer can profit from delivering punishment. We use a controlled laboratory experiment to examine how justification can combat profit-seeking punishment and promote the legitimacy of punishment. In a one-shot sender-receiver game, an independent third...