Guala, Francesco (2010) Reciprocity: weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Strong Reciprocity theorists claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms that eliminate incentives to free ride, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. There is little doubt that costly punishment raises cooperation in laboratory conditions. Its efficacy in the field however is controversial. I distinguish two interpretations of experimental results, and show that the wide interpretation endorsed by Strong Reciprocity theorists is unsupported by ethnographic evidence on decentralised punishment and by historical evidence on common pool institutions. The institutions that spontaneously evolve to solve dilemmas of cooperation typically exploit low-cost mechanisms, turning finite games into indefinitely repeated ones and eliminating the cost of sanctioning.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Guala, Francesco
Keywords:	Experiments, Cooperation, Punishment, Evolution
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Economics Specific Sciences > Biology Specific Sciences > Sociology
Depositing User:	Francesco Guala
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2010
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2010 15:13
Item ID:	2365
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Economics Specific Sciences > Biology Specific Sciences > Sociology
Date:	July 2010
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/2365

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