PUNISHMENT WITHOUT CRIME: A TALE OF COOPERATION AND COMPETITION IN PUBLIC GOODS GAMES

Punishment is known to be one of the major factor of cooperation in the public goods (PG) games. However, the exact nature and reasons why people punish each other to a large extent remains unexplored. In this work we study the punishment strategies in a systematic way, disentangling several possible explanations for punishing behaviour, including competitive, emotional and preemptive motives, alongside with availability and tolerance towards punishment. We set and ran a series of experiments in different regions of Russia, which establishes that actual disapproval of others’ contirbutions is the determinant of punishment in a minority of cases. Using a structural statistical model, we offer a classification of behavioural strategies of the punishers for our sample, as well as in cross-regional perspective. This analysis establishes that, besides ethical considerations, willingness to outperform other players in the group, and precautionary punishment in anticipation of the punishment from the other player, play a major role in determination of the direction and size of spiteful punishments.