This paper experimentally investigates whether risk-averseindividuals punish less if the outcome of punishment is uncertain thanwhen it is certain. Our design includes three treatments: Baseline inwhich the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game is played; CertainPunishment in which the prisoner’s...

Does a mere availability of punishment increase cooperation in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game? In our experiment we observe that the subjects almost never use punishment. Consistently, the data shows no increase in the cooperation rate as the subjects correctly anticipated that they would...