Survey Evidence on Conditional Norm Enforcement

We discuss survey evidence on individuals' willingness to sanction norm violations - such as evading taxes, drunk driving, fare dodging, or skiving o work - by expressing disapproval or social exclusion. Our data suggest that people condition their sanctioning behavior on their belief about the frequency of norm violations. The more commonly a norm violation is believed to occur, the lower the individuals' inclination to punish it. Based on an instrumental variable approach, we demonstrate that this pattern reflects a causal relationship

Sub-Saharan Growth Surprises: Being Heterogeneous, Inland and Close to the Equator Does not Slow Growth Within Africa-super- †

We use two types of cross-country growth regression models to revisit explanations of slow growth in Africa looking at growth rate variation among African countries only. Both sets of models produce results that are surprising given conclusions based on global sample: within Africa, we find a greater coastal population negatively and greater ethnic heterogeneity positively associated with growth, while distance from the equator is at first negatively and only later positively associated with growth. Our results suggest also that institutional and policy variables are endogenous to geographical and historical factors including the colonising power and the religious and ethnic make-up of the country. Copyright 2011 The author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected], Oxford University Press.

On Perverse and Second-Order Punishment in Public Goods Experiments with Decentralized Sanctioning

The fact that many people take it upon themselves to impose costly punishment on free riders helps to explain why collective action sometimes succeeds despite the prediction of received theory. But while individually imposed sanctions lead to higher contributions in public goods experiments, there is usually little or no net efficiency gain from them, because punishment is costly and at times misdirected. We document the frequency and probable causes of punishment of high contributors in several recent studies, and we report a new experiment which shows that introducing higher-order punishment opportunities offer a partial solution to the problem, but also reveal the deep-seatedness of retaliatory tendencies

The Ecology of Collective Action: A Public Goods and Sanctions Experiment with Controlled Group Formation

Mounting evidence suggests that the outcomes of laboratory public goods games, and collective action in firms, communities, and polities, reflect the presence in most groups of individuals having differing preferences and beliefs. We designed a public goods experiment with targeted punishment opportunities to (a) confirm subject heterogeneity, (b) test the stability of subjects’ types and (c) test the proposition that differences in group outcomes can be predicted with knowledge of the types of individuals who compose those groups. We demonstrate that differences in the inclination to cooperate have considerable persistence, that differences in levels of cooperation after many periods of repeated interaction can be significantly predicted by differences in inclination to cooperate which are manifested in the initial periods, and that significantly greater social efficiency can be achieved by grouping less cooperative subjects with those inclined to punish free riding while excluding those prone to perverse retaliation against cooperators

Getting Punishment Right: Do Costly Monitoring or Redistributive Punishment Help?

We introduce new treatments of a voluntary contribution mechanism with opportunities to punish, to see how contributions and punishments change when (a) each dollar lost in punishment must be awarded to another team member and/or when (b) obtaining information on individuals' contributions is a costly choice. Conjectures that tying punishments to rewards might reduce punishment of high contributors (perverse punishment) or increase overall punishing are not completely born out, but innovation (a) nonetheless succeeds in making the net punishment of high contributors much less common because they receive enough rewards to offset punishment. A surprise finding is that innovation (b) also decreases the incidence of misdirected punishment, since high contributors do more monitoring than low ones while low contributors do most of the perverse punishing. Both innovations raise both contributions and earnings relative to the familiar VCM-with-punishment treatment

Cooperation Norms in Multiple-Stage Punishment

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social-dilemma game. Their findings are striking: absolute norms outperform the relative norms commonly regarded as the determinants of 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 actions. Our results partly confirm the findings of Carpenter and Matthews: only for the punishment-related decisions in the first iteration is the absolute norm outperformed by the self-referential norm set by the punisher's own contribution. For the decisions in all later iterations, as well as for bystanders' support in all iterations, the absolute norm organizes our data best. In contrast to the study by Carpenter and Matthews, we find an absolute norm of 3=4 of players' endowments to be both consistent across decisions and relatively stable over time