Winners don't punish

Citation: Anna Dreber, David G. Rand, Drew Fudenberg, Martin A. Nowak (2008) Winners don't punish. Nature (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1038/nature06723
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1038/nature06723
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1038/nature06723
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Winners don't punish
Tagged: Economics (RSS)

Summary

Dreber et al. paper is a sort of behavioral economics/social dilemma study that uses humans playing a modified prisoner dilemma to look at the use of costly punishment.

Costly punishment means incurring a cost for another person to incur a cost. The idea of costly punishment has been put forward by a number of people as a mechanism through which cooperation might have evolved. This papers uses control groups in a repeated games setup where players can cooperate and defect and then looks at other games where players can choose to cooperate, defect, or engage in costly punishment.

The findings show a strong negative correlations between total payoff and use of costly punishment. The people who gain the highest payoffs tend not use costly punishment. The authors conclude that costly punishment is maladaptive to cooperation games and may have evolved for different reasons.

In the setup, cooperation meant paying 1 unit for other player to receive either 2 or 3 units (in two different treatments). Defection meant gaining one unit the cost of one unit for the other. Punishment meant paying one unit cost the other person 4.