CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Jack Roycroft-Sherry

Title: Rules, Cooperation & Punishment

Abstract: People’s tendency to follow rules—even when it is costly—has been repeatedly demonstrated in experimental economics. Rule-following has been proposed as a key reason humans can sustain long-term cooperation. However, the mechanisms by which rule-following fosters cooperation are not well understood. This study proposes an experimental design to examine how rules govern cooperation by comparing a repeated public-goods game with an explicit rule prescribing contributions to the public good to one without such a rule. I also include peer-punishment treatments, given the purported importance of punishment in sustaining cooperation, to probe how rules and punishment interact in cooperation dilemmas.