An economic experiment reveals that humans prefer pool punishment to maintain the commons

Punishment can stabilize costly cooperation and ensure the success of a common project that is threatened by free-riders. Punishment mechanisms can be classified into pool punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by a paid third party, (e.g. a police system or a sheriff), and peer punishm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2012-09, Vol.279 (1743), p.3716-3721
Main Authors: Traulsen, Arne, Röhl, Torsten, Milinski, Manfred
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological Evolution
Cooperation
Cooperative Behavior
Cost efficiency
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Efficiency loss
Evolution Of Cooperation
Experiment design
Game Theory
Group Processes
Humans
Modeling
Models, Psychological
Peer Punishment
Police
Pool Punishment
Public goods
Punishment
Social Behavior
Social evolution
Volunteerism
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Summary:Punishment can stabilize costly cooperation and ensure the success of a common project that is threatened by free-riders. Punishment mechanisms can be classified into pool punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by a paid third party, (e.g. a police system or a sheriff), and peer punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by peers. Which punishment mechanism is preferred when both are concurrently available within a society? In an economic experiment, we show that the majority of subjects choose pool punishment, despite being costly even in the absence of defectors, when second-order free-riders, cooperators that do not punish, are also punished. Pool punishers are mutually enforcing their support for the punishment organization, stably trapping each other. Our experimental results show how organized punishment could have displaced individual punishment in human societies.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2945
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2012.0937