The cost of noise: Stochastic punishment falls short of sustaining cooperation in social dilemma experiments (original) (raw)
Fig 1
Experimental design.
Each round of our PGG experiments consists of two stages. In the first stage, participants invest an amount from 0 to 10 MUs in a public good (“group project”). The returns to this investment (the total amount invested times r = 2) are then shared equally between all participants, irrespective of their contribution. In the second stage, participants are given an opportunity to reduce the income, i.e. punish, other participants. For this, they can spend up to 10 MUs (“coins”) to punish other participants; each MU is multiplied by a factor β and the resulting amount is substrated from the punishee’s account. In the control group, β is fixed to the value 3; in treatment groups, β is a random variable with mean 3 and varying standard deviation.