Taking punishment into your own hands: An experiment on the motivation underlying punishment

Arbeitspapier

In a punishment experiment, we separate the demand for punishment in general from a possible demand to conduct punishment personally. Subjects experience an unfair split of their earnings from a real effort task and have to decide on the punishment of the person who determines the distribution. First, it is established whether the allocator's payoff is reduced and, afterwards, subjects take part in a second price auction for the right to (physically) carry out the act of payoff reduction. This auction only resolves who will punish, not whether punishment takes place, so only subjects with a demand for personal punishment should bid.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Discussion Paper Series ; No. 501

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Group Behavior
• Subject: personal punishment ; real effort task ; experiment ; auction ; desire to win ; Auktionstheorie ; Soziale Beziehungen ; Test

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Duersch, Peter ; Müller, Julia
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics
• (where): Heidelberg
• (when): 2010

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.11588/heidok.00010669
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/127318
• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-106694
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:46 AM CET