Reciprocity: Weak or Strong? What Punishment Experiments Do (and Do Not) Demonstrate

dc.contributor.authorGuala, Francesco
dc.date.accessioned2010-09-08T20:17:08Z
dc.date.available2010-09-08T20:17:08Z
dc.date.issued2010en_US
dc.description.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."en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/6259
dc.languageEnglishen_US
dc.publisher.workingpaperseriesUniversity of Milan Department of Economics, Italyen_US
dc.relation.ispartofseriesBusiness and Statistics Working Paper, no. 2010-23en_US
dc.subjectcooperationen_US
dc.subjectevolutionen_US
dc.subject.sectorSocial Organizationen_US
dc.subject.sectorTheoryen_US
dc.titleReciprocity: Weak or Strong? What Punishment Experiments Do (and Do Not) Demonstrateen_US
dc.typeWorking Paperen_US
dc.type.methodologyCase Studyen_US

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