Economic Incentives : Effect Of Social Disapproval

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citet{carpenter2006mutual} following similar work by citet{gachter2000cooperation}, provide empirical evidence that economic incentives can reinforce the effect of social disapproval. Both the mentioned papers consider groups of people ranging from five to ten. Each group plays ten rounds, and are then moved to a different group after each round in the `strangers ' treatment. There are three stages to each round, firstly they must contribute, secondly the contributions are made public and finally in the treatments that had a punishment round, players have an opportunity to punish another player at a cost to them self. The results of both papers show the trend that people who contribute less are punished and in later rounds they will contribute more. This suggests that punishment works, interestingly the willingness of players to punish cannot be explained in an economic sense as it is at cost to them. This is referred to by citet{bowles2004evolution} as `strong reciprocity ', this is defined as the willingness to enforce a social norm at material cost to oneself and no expectation of benefit for them or anyone else. In terms for this dissertation an action that cannot be explained by classical economic analysis which justifies actions with the self-interest motive, which suggests that the separability conditioned outlined by citet{bowles2008social} at the beginning of this chapter does not hold. Furthermore the behaviour of those that are punished cannot be explained with

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