Conditional Punishment in England

Abstract

A large body of literature has shown that peer-to-peer punishment is effective in enforcing cooperation norms in dilemmas. Kamei [2014, Economics Letters 124, pp.199-202] provides experimental evidence on the prevalence of heterogeneous conditional punishment types by conducting an experiment with a strategy method in the United States. This note reports a replication experiment using subjects in England. As consistent with Kamei (2014), the experiment indicates that people’s punishment decisions are on average positively proportional to the others’ punishment toward the target. However, it also indicates interesting cross-country differences in the distribution of human conditional punishment types.

Keywords: Experiment, Cooperation, Punishment, Dilemma

JEL Classification: C91, C92, D70, H41