Promoting cooperation: the distribution of reward and punishment power

Nosenzo, Daniele; Sefton, Martin

Abstract

Recent work in experimental economics on the effectiveness of rewards and punishments for promoting cooperation mainly examines decentralized incentive systems where all group members can reward and/or punish one another. Many self-organizing groups and societies, however, concentrate the power to reward or punish in the hands of a subset of group members (‘central monitors’). We review the literature on the relative merits of punishment and rewards when the distribution of incentive power is diffused across group members, as in most of the extant literature, and compare this with more recent work and new evidence showing how concentrating reward/punishment power in one group member affects cooperation.

Citation

Nosenzo, D., & Sefton, M. (2014). Promoting cooperation: the distribution of reward and punishment power. In P. A. Van Lange, B. Rockenbach, & T. Yamagishi (Eds.), Reward and punishment in social dilemmas. Oxford University Press

• Publication Date: May 8, 2014
• Deposit Date: Sep 9, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 9, 2015
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Series in human cooperation
• Book Title: Reward and punishment in social dilemmas
• ISBN: 9780199300730
• Keywords: Rewards; punishment; discretionary incentives; decentralized incentives; peer-to-peer incentives; centralized incentives; experiment.
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/729060
• Related Public URLs: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199300747.do
• Additional Information: This is a draft of an article that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book Reward and punishment in social dilemmas / edited by Paul A.M. Van Lange, Bettina Rockenbach, Toshio Yamagishi due for publication in 2014.