The long-run benefits of punishment.

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Experiments have shown that punishment enhances socially beneficial cooperation but that the costs of punishment outweigh the gains from cooperation. This challenges evolutionary models of altruistic cooperation and punishment, which predict that punishment will be beneficial. We compared 10- and 50-period cooperation experiments. With the longer time horizon, punishment is unambiguously beneficial.

Related collections

Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Science

Title: Science (New York, N.Y.)

Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

ISSN (Electronic): 1095-9203

ISSN (Print): 0036-8075

Publication date (Electronic): Dec 05 2008

Volume: 322

Issue: 5907

Affiliations

[1 ] Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, School of Economics, Sir Clive Granger Building, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. simon.gaechter@nottingham.ac.uk

Article

Publisher Item ID: 322/5907/1510

DOI: 10.1126/science.1164744

PubMed ID: 19056978

SO-VID: 92e775fa-5fd3-4779-a183-b0cc1d12ee56

History

Data availability:

Comments

Comment on this article

scite_

Smart Citations

Citing PublicationsSupportingMentioningContrasting

View Citations

See how this article has been cited at scite.ai

scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made.