A vast amount of empirical and theoretical research on public good games indicates that the threat of punishment can … curb free-riding in human groups engaged in joint enterprises. Since punishment is often costly, however, this raises an … investigations, so far, considered peer punishment: players could impose fines on those who exploited them, at a cost to themselves …

The existence of punishment opportunities has been shown to cause efficiency in public goods experiments to increase … considerably. In this paper we ask whether punishment also has a downside in terms of process dissatisfaction. We conduct an … experiment to study the conjecture that an environment with stronger punishment possibilities leads to higher material but lower …

We elicit human conditional punishment types by conducting experiments. We find that their punishment decisions to an … individual are on average significantly positively proportional to other members’ punishment decisions to that individual. …

punishment. However, neither option is without cost. What is the tradeoff between these strategies? In this study, we introduce … an exogenous punishment mechanism that varies the probability and magnitude of punishment to examine this tradeoff. In … our punishment system, sanctions are imposed on the lowest contributor according to a predetermined probability rather …

investments in reward, about the same expenses for punishment, and no significant difference among the four treatments regarding …

subjects in Australia. We also vary our experimental design to examine the impact of a more effective punishment system and the …