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Promoting cooperation in nonlinear social dilemmas through peer punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Timothy N. Cason  and
Lata Gangadharan
Timothy N. Cason*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Lata Gangadharan
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
*
cason@purdue.edu
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Abstract

Many social dilemmas exhibit nonlinearities and equilibrium outcomes in the interior of the choice space. This paper reports a laboratory experiment studying whether peer punishment promotes socially efficient behavior in such environments, which have been ignored in most experimental studies of peer punishment. It compares the effectiveness of peer punishment in a linear public good game to the effectiveness of this decentralized enforcement mechanism in two nonlinear social dilemma games: a piecewise linear public good game and a common pool resource game. While peer punishment improves cooperation in these new environments, the impact of punishment is weaker and takes longer to be effective. This appears to be due to the greater complexity of the nonlinear settings, which makes socially optimal choices more difficult to identify.

Keywords

ExperimentVoluntary contributions mechanismCommon pool resourcesPublic goodsNonlinear returns

JEL classification

H41: Public Goods C90: General D70: General
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 18 , Issue 1: Special Issue In Honor of Elinor “Lin” Ostrom , March 2015 , pp. 66 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9393-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Supplementary material: File

Cason and Gangadharan supplementary material

Appendix: Experiment Instructions (CPR with Punishment)
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