Avoiding detection or reciprocating norm violations? An experimental comparison of self- and other-regarding mechanisms for norm adherence

Abstract

There is a growing body of research showing that people altruistically enforce cooperation norms in social dilemmas. Most of this research analyzes situations where norm violators are known and group members enforce cooperation among each other. However, in many situations norm violators are unknown and detection and punishment is enforced by third parties, such as in plagiarism, tax evasion, doping or even two-timing. Our contribution is threefold. Conceptually, we show the usefulness of inspection game experiments for studying norma Show more