*Cancelled* CeDEx Seminar - Irenaeus Wolff (University of Konstanz)

Rights, Duties, and Taboos: The Social Codex of Peer-Punishment

Objective: Traditionally, peer punishment in social dilemmas has been understood as a second-order public good, which means punishing is akin to a duty. More recently, scholars have been pointing out that this may be a misconception, and that punishment may be more similar to a right of cooperating players. We study the social norms pertaining to punishment in an incentive-compatible way.

Method: Using the Krupka-Weber method, we analyse in detail the different facets of punishment—norm enforcement, sanction enforcement, retaliation, and `stepping in for a punished peer‘. Furthermore, we disentangle different types of punishment in terms of the co-operation levels of the parties involved in the primary punishment action. We are currently implementing the study in additional countries, to see how the results relate to the known patterns of punishment across societies.

Results: We find that four simple rules organise punishment in a German subject pool: (i) do not punish a co-operator; (ii) defectors should not punish; (iii) punish those who violated (i) or (ii); and (iv) the punishment of defectors tends to be a right of co-operators, albeit not to a relatively large minority, for whom it seems to be a duty.