Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctioning. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions in alternative punishment networks. Our results show...

In a principal–agent model, we find that firms may not always benefit from the relative concerns of agents if such concerns are heterogeneous. Further, accounting for the influence of the environment on such concerns, profits are reduced relative to the no-comparisons benchmark.