Intergroup Conflict and Intra-Group Punishment in an Experimental Contest Game

Inter-Group Conflict and Intra-Group Punishment in an Experimental Contest Game

We study how conflict in contest games is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The theoretical prediction is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and of whether punishment is available or not. We find, first, that conflict expenditures of groups are s...

Costly punishment prevails in intergroup conflict.

Understanding how societies resolve conflicts between individual and common interests remains one of the most fundamental issues across disciplines. The observation that humans readily incur costs to sanction uncooperative individuals without tangible individual benefits has attracted considerable attention as a proximate cause as to why cooperative behaviours might evolve. However, the prolife...

Punishment in an Open Contest

In the literature on contests, punishments have received much less attention than prizes. One possible reason is that punishing the bottom player(s) in a contest where contestants are not allowed to quit, while e¤ective in increasing contestants’total e¤ort, often violates individual rationality constraints –low ability players may have a negative expected utility in equilibrium since they have...

Supporting Information for Costly Punishment Prevails in Intergroup Conflict

Intergroup conflict: individual, group, and collective interests.

Intergroup conflicts generally involve conflicts of interests within the competing groups as well. This article outlines a taxonomy of games, called team games, which incorporates the intragroup and intergroup levels of conflict. Its aims are to provide a coherent framework for analyzing the prototypical problems of cooperation and competition that arise within and between groups, and to review...