CeDEx workshop - Christian Thöni (University of Lausanne)

Collective action in norm enforcement - the role of communication

Abstract:

The effectiveness of sanctioning institutions on cooperation in public goods games is documented by numerous studies (e.g., Fehr and Gächter, 2002). This result is remarkable, because the punishment stage can be seen as a second public goods game, in which a group of cooperators can free ride on others’ punishment expenditures. This study focuses on the effects of communication on punishment decisions. We report data from one-shot three person public goods game with punishment. We introduce the possibility of communication in the stage where subjects choose punishment. There are four treatments: (i) a baseline treatment without communication, (ii) a communication treatment, where subjects can use a common chat room, (iii) a bilateral communication treatment, where each subject has a bilateral chat with each other subject, and finally (iv) a bilateral communication treatment in which subjects can be excluded from communication. We find that the introduction of communication has (at least) two effects: on the one hand it makes punishment more effective because cooperative subjects coordinate their punishment efforts. On the other hand, communication lowers punishment, presumably because subjects use verbal punishment as a substitute for monetary punishment and because communication decreases the social distance between punisher and punishee. Consequently we observe similar contributions in the treatments with bilateral and common chat possibilities and the baseline treatment. Only if subjects have the possibility to exclude other subjects from the chat we observe higher contributions relative to the baseline treatment.