This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a...

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a...

This paper examines the determinants of informal sanctions by a large number of experiments.

We study how social evaluation affects conformity and anticonformity in theory and in an experiment. In theory, we show that negative social evaluation, i.e., potential punishment, creates incentives for conformity. Positive social evaluation, i.e., potential reward, creates incentives for...

Field evidence suggests that agents belonging to the same group tend to behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. Testing for such effects raises severe identification problems. We conduct an experiment that avoids these problems. The main design feature is that each...