This paper investigates how punishment promotes cooperation when the punishment enforcer is independent of its proposer. In a prisoner's dilemma experiment, compared with the case when the implicated parties are allowed to punish each other, cooperation is lower when the enforcement of...

Previous findings on punishment have focused on environments in which the outcomes are known with certainty. In this paper, we conduct experiments to investigate how punishment affects cooperation in a two-person stochastic prisoner's dilemma environment where each person can decide whether or...

Research examining the effect of weak punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. We examine whether this effect is due to a lack of perceived legitimacy of rule enforcement, which would enable agents to justify selfish behavior. We...